
Class _^_tBil^l 
Book. _Ci__ 



Copyright]^". 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



MODERN ENGLISH PROSE 



f^y^' 



MODERN ENGLISH 
PROSE 



SELECTED AND EDITED 

BY 

GEORGE RICE CARPENTER 

AND 

WILLIAM TENNEY BREWSTER 

PROFESSORS IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1904 

A2i rights reserved 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

JAN 27 1904 

\ Copyright Entry 
CLASS «- XXc. No, 
COPY 3 



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'Kt 



Copyright, 1904, 

By the macmillan company. 

Set up, electrotyped, and published January, 1904. 



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Nottoooti ilrrss 

J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

Our aim in compiling this volume has been to present 
the largest possible amount of illustrative material for 
classes in rhetoric and English composition. In propor- 
tion as the secondary teaching of English becomes more 
adequate, the need of instructing freshmen in elementary 
rhetorical principles tends to disappear, and with it much 
of the importance of a text-book of rhetoric. Even where 
the text-book cannot be dispensed with altogether, the 
experienced teacher will wish to have it supplemented as 
much as possible by the reading and study of good models. 
Practically, as we have all found, this must be done by 
using a volume of illustrative material. But the available 
books of this sort are few. They contain comparatively 
little matter, and this matter consists mainly of short 
extracts, often illustrative only of one special form of 
composition. Our aim has been to present a rich store 
of material in complete essays, stories, chapters, or com- 
ponent parts of larger works, to provide illustration for 
all the main forms of composition, and to offer as little 
annotation and explanation as possible. The notes and 
questions at the end of the volume are merely suggestive, 
and though the book may be used by itself, it can also be 



Vi PREFACE 

made supplementary to any of the standard treatises on 
rhetoric. 

The selections are complete and unabridged in every 
case, except that of Hudson's Plains of Patagonia, where 
a short excursus was omitted. The texts are, so far as 
possible, based upon first or standard editions. Foot- 
notes in brackets are those of the compilers. Foot-notes 
not in brackets are those of the original authors. To 
economize space we have, however, omitted authors' foot- 
notes when they consisted merely of bibliographical refer- 
ences or similar unessential matter, 

G. R. C. 
W. T. B. 

January, 1904. 



CONTENTS 



Byzantium .... 
The Yosemite Valley . 
Lander's Cottage 
St. Mark's .... 
The Plains of Patagonia 
The World's End 
Wee Willie Winkie 
The Cask of Amontillado . 
Ethan Brand 

Markheim .... 
Among the Corn-rows 
The Lad in the Hemp-field . 
The Miracle of the Peach Tree 
A Dog and his Master 
The Combat in the Desert . 
David and the Ark 
Pendennis Falls in Love 
A Voice from the Past 
An Impetuous Lover . 
The Civil War . 
Braddock's Defeat 
The Storming of the Bastille 
Queen Elizabeth . 
National Characteristics as mould- 
ing Public Opinion 



Edward Gibbon . 
Josiah Divight Whitney 
Edgar Allan Poe . 
John R us kin 
IV. H. Hudson . 
George Borrow 
Rudyard Kipling . 
Edgar Allan Poe . 
Nathaniel Hawthorne . 
Robert Louis Stevenson 
Hamlin Garland . 
James Lane Allen 
Maurice Hewlett . 
Jack London 
Walter Scott 
Charles Dickens . 



William Makepeace Thackeray 1 44 
George Eliot . . . 155 

George Meredith . . .165 
Thomas Babington Macaulay 175 
Francis Park matt . .188 

Thomas Carlyle . . .198 
John Richard Green . . 206 

James Bryce . . . '215 
vii 



PAGB 
I 

5 
18 

25 
30 
37 
42 

52 
59 
75 
92 
105 
108 

113 
123 
130 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 



The Origin of the Yosemite Valley 
On a Piece of Chalk . 
Glacier Ice ..... 
Learned Words and PopularWords 

Sweetness and Light . 

Ornate Art 

Charles Lamb .... 
The Pathetic Fallacy . 
Knowledge viewed in Relation to 

Professional Skill . 
The American Scholar 
Where I Lived, and What I Lived 

for 

The Gettysburg Address 
Second Inaugural Address . 
Civil Liberty .... 
Nil Nisi Bonum .... 
The Hero as Poet 
Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist 
The Vision of Sudden Death 
An Apology for Idlers 



Josiah Dwight Whitney . 226 

Thomas Henry Huxley . 232 

John Tyndall . . . 254 

James Bradsireet Greenough 
and George Lyman Kittredge 260 

Matthew Arnold . . . 267 

Walter Bagehot . . .291 

Walter Pater . . . 303 

John Rtiskin . . '314 

John Henry Newman . . 330 

Ralph Waldo Emerson . 351 

Henry David Thoreau . . 370 

Abraham Liiicohi . . 384 

Abrahajn Lincoln . . 385 

John Stuart Mill . . . 387 
William Makepeace Thackeray 401 

Thomas Carlyle . . .410 

Charles Lamb . . -431 

Thomas De Quincey . . 438 

Robert Louis Stevenson . 455 



Notes and Questions 465 



MODERN ENGLISH PROSE 



BYZANTIUM 

EDWARD GIBBON 

[From chapter xvii of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire, 1781. The text is that of Bury's edition.] 

If we survey Byzantium in the extent which it acquired with 
the august name of Constantinople, the figure of the Imperial 
city may be represented under that of an unequal triangle. The 
obtuse point, which advances towards the east and the shores of 
Asia, meets and repels the waves of the Thracian Bosphorus. 
The northern side of the city is bounded by the harbour ; and 
the southern is washed by the Propontis, or Sea of Marmara. 
The basis of the triangle is opposed to the west, and terminates 
the continent of Europe. But the admirable form and division 
of the circumjacent land and water cannot, without a more ample 
explanation, be clearly or sufficiently understood. 

The winding channel through which the waters of the Euxine 
flow with a rapid and incessant course towards the Mediterranean 
received the appellation of Bosphorus, a name not less celebrated 
in the history than in the fables of antiquity. A crowd of temples 
and of votive altars, profusely scattered along its steep and woody 
banks, attested the unskilfulness, the terrors, and the devotion of 
the Grecian navigators, who, after the example of the Argonauts, 
explored the dangers of the inhospitable Euxine. On these banks 
tradition long preserved the memory of the palace of Phineus, in- 
fested by the obscene harpies ; and of the sylvan reign of Amy- 
cus, who defied the son of Leda to the combat of the Cestus. 
The straits of the Bosphorus are terminated by the Cyanean 
rocks, which, according to the description of the poets, had once 
floated on the face of the waters, and were destined by the gods 
to protect the entrance of the Euxine against the eye of profane 
curiosity. From the Cyanean rocks to the point and harbour of 

B I 



2 B YZANTIUM 

Byzantium, the winding length of the Bosphorus extends about 
sixteen miles, and its most ordinary breadth may be computed at 
about one mile and a half. The new castles of Europe and Asia 
are constructed, on either continent, upon the foundations of two 
celebrated temples, of Serapis and of Jupiter Urius. The old 
castles, a work of the Greek emperors, command the narrowest 
part of the channel, in a place where the opposite banks advance 
within five hundred paces of each other. These fortresses were 
restored and strengthened by Mahomet the Second, when he 
meditated the siege of Constantinople : but the Turkish con- 
queror was most probably ignorant that, near two thousand years 
before his reign, Darius had chosen the same situation to connect 
the two continents by a bridge of boats. At a small distance 
from the old castles we discover the little town of Chrysopohs, 
or Scutari, which may almost be considered as the Asiatic suburb 
of Constantinople. The Bosphorus, as it begins to open into the 
Propontis, passes between Byzantium and Chalcedon. The latter 
of these cities was built by the Greeks, a few years before the 
former; and the blindness of its founders, who overlooked the 
superior advantages of the opposite coast, has been stigmatized by 
a proverbial expression of contempt. 

The harbour of Constantinople, which may be considered as 
an arm of the Bosphorus, obtained, in a very remote period, the 
denomination of the Golden Horn. The curve which it describes 
might be compared to the horn of a stag, or, as it should seem, 
with more propriety, to that of an ox. The epithet of golden was 
expressive of the riches which every wind wafted from the most 
distant countries into the secure and capacious port of Constanti- 
nople. The river Lycus, formed by the conflux of two little 
streams, pours into the harbour a perpetual supply of fresh water, 
which serves to cleanse the bottom and to invite the periodical 
shoals of fish to seek their retreat in that convenient recess. As 
the vicissitudes of tides are scarcely felt in those seas, the constant 
depth of the harbour allows goods to be landed on the quays 
without the assistance of boats ; and it has been observed that 
in many places the largest vessels may rest their prows against 
the houses, while their sterns are floating in the water. From the 
mouth of the Lycus to that of the harbour this arm of the Bos- 



EDWARD GIBBON 3 

phorus is more than seven miles in length. The entrance is about 
five hundred yards broad, and a strong chain could be occasionally 
drawn across it to guard the port and city from the attack of an 
hostile navy. 

Between the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, the shores of 
Europe and Asia receding on either side enclose the sea of Mar- 
mara, which was known to the ancients by the denomination 
of Propontis. The navigation from the issue of the Bosphorus to 
the entrance of the Hellespont is about 120 miles. Those who 
steer their westward course through the middle of the Propontis 
may at once descry the high lands of Thrace and Bithynia, and 
never lose sight of the lofty summit of Mount Olympus, covered 
with eternal snows. They leave on the left a deep gulf, at the 
bottom of which Nicomedia was seated, the imperial residence of 
Diocletian ; and they pass the small islands of Cyzicus and Pro- 
connesus before they cast anchor at Gallipoli ; where the sea, 
which separates Asia from Europe, is again contracted into a 
narrow channel. 

The geographers who, with the most skilful accuracy, have sur- 
veyed the form and extent of the Hellespont, assign about sixty 
miles for the winding course, and about three miles for the ordi- 
nary breadth of those celebrated straits. But the narrowest part 
of the channel is found to the northward of the old Turkish 
castles between the cities of Sestus and Abydus. It was here 
that the adventurous Leander braved the passage of the flood for 
the possession of his mistress. It was here likewise, in a place 
where the distance between the opposite banks cannot exceed 
500 paces, that Xerxes imposed a stupendous bridge of boats, 
for the purpose of transporting into Europe 170 myriads of 
barbarians. A sea contracted within such narrow hmits may 
seem but ill to deserve the singular epithet of broad, which 
Homer, as well as Orpheus, has frequently bestowed on the 
Hellespont. But our ideas of greatness are of a relative nature : 
the traveller, and especially the poet, who sailed along the Helles- 
pont, who pursued the windings of the stream, and contemplated 
the rural scenery, which appeared on every side to terminate the 
prospect, insensibly lost the remembrance of the sea ; and his 
fancy painted those celebrated straits with all the attributes of a 



4 B YZANTIUM 

mighty river flowing with a swift current, in the midst of a woody 
and inland country, and at length, through a wide mouth, dis- 
charging itself into the ^gean or Archipelago. Ancient Troy, 
seated on an eminence at the foot of Mount Ida, overlooked the 
mouth of the Hellespont, which scarcely received an accession of 
waters from the tribute of those immortal rivulets Simois and 
Scamander. The Grecian camp had stretched twelve miles along 
the shore, from the Sigaean to the Rhoetean promontory \ and the 
flanks of the army were guarded by the bravest chiefs who fought 
under the banners of Agamemnon. The first of those promon- 
tories was occupied by Achilles with his invincible Myrmidons, 
and the dauntless Ajax pitched his tents on the other. After 
Ajax had fallen a sacrifice to his disappointed pride and to the 
ingratitude of the Greeks, his sepulchre was erected on the 
ground where he had defended the navy against the rage of Jove 
and of Hector ; and the citizens of the rising town of Rhoeteum 
celebrated his memory with divine honours. Before Constantine 
gave a just preference to the situation of Byzantium, he had con- 
ceived the design of erecting the seat of empire on this cele- 
brated spot, from whence the Romans derived their fabulous 
origin. The extensive plain which lies below ancient Troy, 
towards the Rhoetean promontory and the tomb of Ajax, was first 
chosen for his new capital ; and, though the undertaking was soon 
rehnquished, the stately remains of unfinished walls and towers 
attracted the notice of all who sailed through the straits of the 
Hellespont. 

We are at present qualified to view the advantageous position 
of Constantinople, which appears to have been formed by Nature 
for the centre and capital of a great monarchy. Situated in the 
forty-first degree of latitude, the imperial city commanded, from 
her seven hills, the opposite shores of Europe and Asia ; the cli- 
mate was healthy and temperate, the soil fertile, the harbour secure 
and capacious ; and the approach on the side of the continent was 
of small extent and easy defence. The Bosphorus and the Helles- 
pont may be considered as the two gates of Constantinople ; and 
the prince who possessed those important passages could always 
shut them against a naval enemy and open them to the fleets of 
commerce. The preservation of the eastern provinces may, in 



EDWARD GIBBON 5 

some degree, be ascribed to the policy of Constantine, as the bar- 
barians of the Euxine, who in the preceding age had poured their 
armaments into the heart of the Mediterranean, soon desisted 
from the exercise of piracy, and despaired of forcing this insur- 
mountable barrier. When the gates of the Hellespont and Bos- 
phorus were shut, the capital still enjoyed, within their spacious 
inclosure, every production which could supply the wants, or gratify 
the luxury, of its numerous inhabitants. The sea-coast of Thrace 
and Bithynia, which languish under the weight of Turkish oppres- 
sion, still exhibits a rich prospect of vineyards, of gardens, and of 
plentiful harvests ; and the Propontis has ever been renowned for 
an inexhaustible store of the most exquisite fish, that are taken in 
their stated seasons without skill, and almost without labour. But, 
when the passages of the Straits were thrown open for trade, they 
alternately admitted the natural and artificial riches of the north 
and south, of the Euxine, and of the Mediterranean. Whatever 
rude commodities were collected in the forests of Germany and 
Scythia, as far as the sources of the Tanais and the Borysthenes ; 
whatsoever was manufactured by the skill of Europe or Asia ; the 
corn of Egypt, and the gems and spices of the farthest India, were 
brought by the varying winds into the port of Constantinople, 
which, for many ages, attracted the commerce of the ancient 
world. 

THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 

JOSIAH DWIGHT WHITNEY 
[From The Yosernite Guide- Book, 1874.] 

The Yosemite Valley is nearly in the centre of the State north 
and south, and just midway between the east and west bases of 
the Sierra, here a little over seventy miles wide. Its shape and 
position will be best understood by referring to the maps which 
accompany this volume. One of these is a reduction of a map 
prepared by Mr. Gardner for the commissioners, and includ- 
ing only the Valley and its immediate surroundings ; ^ the other, 
from the surveys of Messrs. Hoffmann and Gardner, embraces the 
1 [See Notes, at the end of the volume.] 



6 THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 

Valley and the region adjacent for twenty miles in each direction. 
The Valley is a nearly level area, about six miles in length and 
from half a mile to a mile in width, sunk almost a mile in perpen- 
dicular depth below the general level of the adjacent region. It 
may be roughly likened to a gigantic trough hollowed in the 
mountains, nearly at right angles to the irregular trend ; that is to 
say, north 60° east, the direction of the axis of the Sierra being, 
as before stated, north 31° west. This trough, as will be seen by 
reference to the map, is quite irregular, having several reentering 
angles and square recesses, let back, as it were, into its sides ; 
still, a general northeast-by-easterly direction is maintained in the 
depression, until we arrive near its upper end, when it turns 
sharply, at right angles almost, and soon divides into three 
branches, through either of which we may, going up a series of 
gigantic steps, as it were, ascend to the general level of the 
Sierra. Down each of these branches, or caiions, descend streams, 
forks of the Merced, coming down the steps in a series of stupen- 
dous waterfalls. At its lower end, the Valley contracts into a nar- 
row gorge, or canon, with steeply inclined walls, and not having 
the U shape of the Yosemite, but the usual V form of California 
valleys. 

The principal features of the Yosemite, and those by which it 
is distinguished from all other known valleys, are : first, the near 
approach to verticahty of its walls ; second, their great height, 
not only absolutely, but as compared with the width of the valley 
itself ; and, finally, the very small amount of talus or debris at the 
base of these gigantic cliffs. These are the great characteristics 
of the Yosemite throughout its whole length ; but, besides these, 
there are many other striking peculiarities, and features both of 
subhmity and beauty, which can hardly be surpassed, if equalled, 
by those of any mountain valleys in the world. Either the domes 
or the waterfalls of the Yosemite, or any single one of then? even, 
would be sufficient in any European country to attract travellers 
from far and wide in all directions. Waterfalls in the vicinity of 
the Yosemite, surpassing in beauty many of those best known and 
most visited in Europe, are actually left entirely unnoticed by 
travellers, because there are so many other objects of interest to 
be visited that it is impossible to find time for them all. 



JOSIAH D WIGHT WHITNEY J 

In describing the Yosemite, we will first give the necessary 
details in regard to the different objects of interest in and about 
the Valley, following it upward, and supposing the traveller to enter 
from the Mariposa side. In doing this, we will point out the 
prominent objects, in the order in which they present themselves, 
giving the statistics of their elevation and dimensions, so far as 
required or ascertained ; after this has been done, we can enter 
into more general considerations in regard to the Valley and its 
surroundings, speaking of it as a whole, after due description of 
its parts. 

In descending the Mariposa trail, a steep climb of 2973 feet 
down to the bottom of the Valley, the traveller has presented to 
him a succession of views, all of which range over the whole extent 
of the principal valley, revealing its dominant features, while at 
each new point of view he is brought nearer and, as it were, more 
face to face with these gigantic objects. The principal points 
seen present themselves as follows : on the left is El Capitan, on 
the right the Bridal Veil Fall, coming down on the back side of 
the Cathedral Rock, and in the centre the view of the Valley, and 
beyond into the canon of the Tenaya Fork of the Merced ; the 
point of the Half Dome is just visible over the ridge of which 
Sentinel Rock forms a part, and beyond it, in the farthest distance. 
Cloud's Rest is seen. A general idea of the Valley can be well 
obtained from this point and in one view ; but, as we ride up 
between the walls, new objects are constantly becoming visible, 
which at the lower end were entirely concealed. 

Of the cliffs around the Valley, El Capitan and the Half Dome 
are the most striking ; the latter is the higher, but it would be 
difficult to say which conveys to the mind the most decided 
impression of grandeur and massiveness. El Capitan is an immense 
block of granite, projecting squarely out into the Valley, and pre- 
senting an almost vertical sharp edge, 3300 feet in elevation. 
The sides or walls of the mass are bare, smooth, and entirely 
destitute of vegetation. It is almost impossible for the observer 
to comprehend the enormous dimensions of this rock, which in 
clear weather can be distinctly seen from the San Joaquin plains, 
at a distance of fifty or sixty miles. Nothing, however, so helps to 
a realization of the magnitude of these masses about the Yosemite 



8 THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 

as climbing around and among them. Let the visitor begin to 
ascend the pile of debris which lies at the base of El Capitan, 
and he will soon find his ideas enlarged on the point in question. 
And yet these debris piles along the cliffs, and especially under El 
Capitan, are of insignificant size compared with the dimensions 
of the solid wall itself. They are hardly noticeable in taking a 
general view of the Valley. El Capitan imposes on us by its 
stupendous bulk, which seems as if hewed from the mountains on 
purpose to stand as the type of eternal massiveness. It is doubt- 
ful if anywhere in the world there is presented so squarely cut, so 
lofty, and so imposing a face of rock. 

On the other side of the Valley we have the Bridal Veil Fall, 
unquestionably one of the most beautiful objects in the Yosemite. 
It is formed by the creek of the same name, which rises a few 
miles east of Empire Camp, runs through the meadows at West- 
fall's, and is finally precipitated over the cliffs, on the west side of 
Cathedral Rock, into the Yosemite, in one leap of 630 feet per- 
pendicular. The water strikes here on a sloping pile of debris, 
down which it rushes in a series of cascades, for a perpendicular 
distance of nearly 300 feet more, the total height of the edge of 
the fall above the meadow at its base being 900 feet. The effect 
of the fall, as everywhere seen from the Valley, is as if it were 900 
feet in vertical height, its base being concealed by the trees which 
surround it. The quantity of water in the Bridal Veil Fall varies 
greatly with the season. In May and June the amount is gener- 
ally at the maximum, and it gradually decreases as the summer 
advances. The effect, however, is finest when the body of water 
is not too heavy, since then the swaying from side to side, and the 
waving under the varying pressure of the wind, as it strikes the 
long column of water, is more marked. As seen from a distance 
at such times, it seems to flutter like a white veil, producing an 
indescribably beautiful effect. The name " Bridal Veil " is poeti- 
cal, but fairly appropriate. The stream which supplies this fall 
heads low down in the Sierra, far below the region of eternal snow ; 
hence, as summer advances, the supply of water is rapidly dimin- 
ished, and by the middle or end of July there is only a small 
streamlet trickling down the vertical face of the rock, over which 
it is precipitated in a bold curve when the quantity of water is 



JO SI AH D WIGHT WHITNEY Q 

larger. At the highest stage, the stream divides into a dozen 
streamlets at the base of the fall, several of which are only just 
fordable on horseback. 

The Virgin's Tears Creek, on the other side of the Valley, and 
directly opposite the Bridal Veil, makes also a fine fall, over a 
thousand feet high, included in a deep recess of the rocks near 
the lower corner of El Capitan. This is a beautiful fall as long as 
it lasts ; but the stream which produces it dries up early in the 
season. In quantity of water, elevation, and general effect, this 
fall, hardly spoken of at the Yosemite among so many grander 
ones, is far superior to the celebrated Staubbach of Switzerland. 

Proceeding up the Valley, we find on the same side as the 
Bridal Veil, and a little above it, the prominent and massively 
sculptured pile of granite, to which the name of Cathedral Rock 
has been given. In this view the Merced River occupies the 
foreground ; the trees in the middle ground are pitch pines from 
125 to 150 feet high, and those which seem to fringe the summit 
of Cathedral Rock hke small bushes are, in reality, firs and pines 
as tall as those in the valley, or even taller. Cathedral Rock is 
not so high nor so massive as El Capitan, nor are its sides quite 
so nearly vertical. The summit is 2660 feet above the Valley. 
Just beyond Cathedral Rock, on the same side, are the graceful 
pinnacles of rock called "The Spires." These spires are isolated 
columns of granite, at least 500 feet high, standing out from, but 
connected at the base with, the walls of the Valley. They are 
kept in obscurity, or brought out into wonderful relief, according 
to the different way the light or shadow falls upon them. The 
whole side of the Valley, along this part of it, is fantastically but 
exquisitely carved out into forms of gigantic proportions, which 
anywhere else, except in the Yosemite, would be considered 
objects of the greatest interest. From one point of view these 
spires appear symmetrical, of equal height, squarely cut, and ris- 
ing above the edge of the cliff behind exactly like two towers of 
a Gothic cathedral. 

The next prominent object, in going up the Valley, is the triple 
group of rocks known as the Three Brothers. These rise in steps 
one behind the other, the highest being 3830 feet above the 
valley. From the summit of this there is a superb view of the 



lO THE YO SEMITE VALLEY 

Valley and its surroundings. The peculiar outline of these rocks 
as seen from below, resembling three frogs sitting with their heads 
turned in one direction, is supposed to have suggested the Indian 
name Pompompasus, which means, we are informed, " Leaping 
Frog Rocks." 

Nearly opposite the Three Brothers is a point of rocks project- 
ing into the Valley, the termination of which is a slender mass of 
granite, having something the shape of an obeUsk, and called, from 
its peculiar position or from its resemblance to a gigantic watch- 
tower, the " Sentinel Rock." The obelisk form of the Sentinel 
continues down for a thousand feet or more from its summit ; 
below that it is united with the wall of the Valley. Its entire 
height above the river at its base is 3043 feet. This is one of the 
grandest masses of rock in the Yosemite. 

From near the foot of Sentinel Rock, looking directly across 
the Valley, we have before us what probably most persons will 
admit to be, if not the most stupendous, at least the most attrac- 
tive feature of the Yosemite; namely, "the Yosemite Fall" /lar 
excellence, that one of all the falls about the Valley which is best 
entitled to bear that name. The finest view of this fall is in a 
group of oaks near the Lower Hotel, from which point the various 
parts seem most thoroughly to be blended into one whole of sur- 
prising attractiveness. Even the finest photograph is, however, 
utterly inadequate to convey to the mind any satisfactory impres- 
sion or realization of how many of the elements of grandeur and 
beauty are combined in this waterfall and its surroundings and 
accessories. The first and most impressive of these elements is, 
as in all other objects about the Yosemite, vertical height. In 
this it surpasses, it is believed, any waterfall in the world with any- 
thing like an equal body of water. And all the accessories of 
this fall are of a character worthy of, and commensurate with, its 
height, so that everything is added which can be to augment the 
impression which the descent of so large a mass of water from 
such a height could not fail by itself to produce. 

The Yosemite Fall is formed by a creek of the same name, 
which heads on the west side of the Mount Hoffmann Group, 
about ten miles northeast of the Valley. Being fed by melting 
snows exclusively, and running through its whole course over 



JOSIAH D WIGHT WHITNEY II 

almost bare granite rock, its volume varies greatly at different 
times and seasons, according to the amount of snow remaining 
unmelted, the temperature of the air, and the clearness or cloudi- 
ness of the weather. In the spring, when the snow first begins to 
melt with rapidity, the volume of water is very great ; as ordinarily 
seen by visitors in the most favorable portion of the season, — say 
from May to July, — the quantity is still sufficient to produce a 
fine effect ; still later, it shrinks down to a very much smaller 
volume. We estimated the size of the stream at the summit of 
the fall, at a medium stage of water, to be twenty feet in width 
and two feet in average depth. Mr. J. F. Houghton measured 
the Yosemite Creek below the fall, June 17, 1865, and found it to 
be thirty-seven feet wide and twenty-five inches deep, with the 
velocity of about a mile an hour, giving about half a million cubic 
feet as passing over the fall in an hour.^ At the highest stage of 
water there is probably three times as much as this. The vertical 
height of the lip of the fall above the Valley is, in round num- 
bers, 2600 feet, our various measurements giving from 2537 to 
2641, the discrepancies being due to the fact that a near approach 
to, or a precise definition of, the place where the perpendicular 
portion of the fall commences is not possible. The lip or edge 
of the fall is a great rounded mass of granite, polished to the last 
degree, on which it was found to be a very hazardous matter to 
move. A difference of a hundred feet, in a fall of this height, 
would be entirely imperceptible to most eyes. 

The fall is not in one perpendicular sheet. There is first a 
vertical descent of 1500 feet, when the water strikes on what 
seems to be a projecting ledge ; but which, in reality, is a shelf or 
recess, almost a third of a mile back from the front of the lower 
portion of the cliff. From here the water finds its way, in a series 
of cascades, down a descent equal to 626 feet perpendicular, and 
then gives one final plunge of about 400 feet on to a low talus of 
rocks at the base of the precipice. The whole arrangement and 
succession of the different parts of the fall can be easily under- 
stood by ascending to the base of the Upper Fall, which is a very 
interesting and not a difficult climb, or from Sentinel Dome, on 

1 Our measurements gave about 220 cubic feet as the amount of water passing 
over the fall in one second. 



12 THE YO SEMITE VALLEY 

the opposite side of the Valley, where the spectator is at a con- 
siderable distance above its edge.^ As the various portions of the 
fall are nearly in one vertical plane, the effect of the whole is 
nearly as grand, and perhaps even more picturesque, than it would 
be if the descent were made in one leap from the top of the cliff 
to the level of the Valley. Nor is the grandeur or beauty of the 
fall perceptibly diminished, by even a very considerable diminution 
of the quantity of water from its highest stage. One of the most 
striking features of the Yosemite Fall is the vibration of the upper 
portion from one side to the other, under the varying pressure of the 
wind, which acts with immense force on so long a column. The 
descending mass of water is too great to allow of its being entirely 
broken up into spray ; but it widens out very much towards the 
bottom — probably to as much as 300 feet at high water, the 
space through which it moves being fully three times as wide. 
This vibratory motion of the Yosemite and Bridal Veil falls is 
something peculiar, and not observed in any others, so far as we 
know ; the effect of it is indescribably grand, especially under the 
magical illumination of the full moon. 

The cliff a little east of the Yosemite Fall rises in a bold peak 
to the height of 3030 feet above the Valley ; it can be reached up 
Indian Caiion, a httle farther east, and from this point a magnifi- 
cent view of the whole region can be obtained. The ascent to the 
summit of the fall and the return to the Valley can be made in 
one day, and without difficulty, by the trail recently built up this 
canon. It was formerly a very hard climb. 

Following up the Valley for about two miles above the Yosemite 
Falls, we find that the main portion of it comes to an end, and 
that it suddenly branches out in three distinct but much narrower 
canons, as they would be called by Californians, each of which, 
however, has some new wonders to disclose. The Merced River 
keeps the middle one of these, and its course is here about the 
same that it was below or nearly west ; it holds this direction 
nearly up to the base of the Mount Lyell Group, where it heads, 
between the main crest of the Sierra and the parallel subordinate 
or side range called by us the Merced or Obelisk Group. In the 

1 The exact distance from the Sentinel Dome across in a straight line to the 
edge of the Upper Yosemite Fall is two and a half miles. 



JOSIAH D WIGHT WHITNEY 1 3 

left hand, or northwesterly canon, the Tenaya Fork of the Merced 
comes down, and in the right hand, or southwesterly one, the 
South Fork ^ or the Illilouette. 

At the angle where the Yosemite branches we have on the north 
side the rounded, columnar mass of rock called the Washington 
Column, and immediately to the left of it the immense arched 
cavity called the " Royal Arches," and over these is seen the dome- 
shaped mass called the North Dome. This is one of those rounded 
masses of granite which are not uncommon in the Sierra Nevada ; 
it rises to an elevation of 3568 feet above the Valley. Such dome- 
shaped masses are somewhat characteristic of all granitic regions, 
but are nowhere developed on so grand a scale as in the Sierra. 
An examination with a good glass will show that the North Dome 
is made up of huge concentric plates of rock, overlapping each 
other in such a way as to absolutely prevent an ascent on the side 
presented to the Valley ; to the north, however, the Dome runs 
out in a long ridge, as represented on the map, and from that side 
there is not the slightest difficulty in getting to the summit. 

The concentric structure of the North Dome is well seen in the 
Royal Arches, which are, in fact, a sort of appendage to its base. 
This peculiarity of structure pervades the whole mass of rock, and 
it is evident that these arches have been formed by the slipping 
down of immense plates of granite, the size of the cavity thus left 
being enormous, but not easily measured. The arches and the 
column, at the angle of the main valley and the Tenaya Cafion, 
seem as if intended to form a base of adequate magnitude and 
grandeur for the support of the Dome which rests upon them. 

The Half Dome, on the opposite side of the Tenaya Caiion, is 
the loftiest and most imposing mass of those considered as part 
of the Yosemite. It is not so high as Cloud's Rest, but the latter 
seems rather to belong to the Sierra than to the Yosemite. The 
Half Dome is in sight, in the distance, as we descend the Mariposa 
trail, but is not visible in the lower part of the Valley itself; it is 
seen first when we come to the meadow opposite Hutching's. It 
is a crest of granite, rising to the height of 4737 feet above the 

1 This is the " South Fork of the Middle Fork," and not the main South Fork, 
which flows by Clark's Ranch. To avoid confusion, it will be well to call it by tlie 
Indian name, Illilouette, one not yet much in use in the Valley. 



14 THE YO SEMITE VALLEY 

Valley, seeming perfectly inaccessible, and being the only one of 
all the prominent points about the Yosemite which never has been, 
and perhaps never will be, trodden by human feet.^ The summit 
of the Half Dome runs in a northeast and southwest direction, 
parallel with the caiion ; it rises on the southwest side with a 
grand, regular, domelike form, but falls off rapidly in a series of 
steps as it descends to the northeast. At right angles with this, 
or crosswise of the mass, the section is very peculiar. On the side 
fronting Tenaya Cafion it is absolutely vertical for 1500 feet or 
more from the summit, and then falls off with a very steep slope, of 
probably sixty or seventy degrees, to the bottom of the canon. This 
slope, however, is not, as one would suppose, a talus of fragments 
fallen from above ; it is a mass of granite rock, part and parcel of 
the solid structure of the Dome ; the real debris pile at the bottom 
is absolutely insignificant in dimensions compared with the Dome 
itself. On the opposite face the Half Dome is not absolutely ver- 
tical ; it has a rounded form at the top, and grows more and more 
steep at the bottom. The whole appearance of the mass is that of 
an originally dome-shaped elevation, with an exceedingly steep 
curve, of which the western half has been split off and become 
ingulfed. This geological theory of its formation appears to have 
forced itself upon those who gave it the name " Half Dome," which 
is one that seems to suggest itself, at the first sight of this truly 
marvellous crest of rock. From the upper part of the Valley, and 
from all the heights about it, the Half Dome presents itself as an 
object of the most imposing grandeur. It has not the massiveness 
of El Capitan, but it is more astonishing, and probably there are 
few visitors to the Valley who would not concede to it the first 
place among all the wonders of the region. Those who have not 

1 An attempt was made in September, 1871, by Mr. John Conway and his son, 
Major, aged nine years, an extremely active and daring climbei-, to get to the top of 
the Half Dome. They were furnished with a rope and eye-bolts, by which the 
hazards of the descent were to be in some measure provided against by carrying 
the rop& through the bolts, driven in as occasion offered, and securing it at the 
upper end. Major reached an elevation of about 300 feet above the saddle or 
shoulder on the northeast side of the Dome, and thinks that he might have attained 
the summit ; but the father deemed the risk too great, as the boy had reached a 
point where he could find no projection to which the rope could be made fast, and 
the return without its assistance was extremely hazardous. [A successful ascent 
was first made in 1875.] 



JOSIAH D WIGHT WHITNEY 1 5 

seen it could never comprehend its extraordinary form and propor- 
tions, not even with the aid of photographs. It is entirely unique 
in the Sierra Nevada ; and, so far as we know, in the world. The 
only possible rival would be the Matterhorn. Each is unique in 
its way ; but the forms of the two are so different that they will 
hardly bear comparison.^ 

Farther up the canon of the Tenaya is a beautiful little lake 
called " Mirror Lake," an expansion of the Tenaya Fork. It is 
frequently visited, and best early in the morning, for the purpose 
of getting the reflection from its unruffled surface of a noble over- 
hanging mass of rock, to which the name of Mount Watkins has 
been given, as a compliment to the photographer who has done so 
much to attract attention to this region. 

Still farther up the Tenaya Fork, on the right-hand side, is 
" Cloud's Rest," the somewhat fanciful designation of a long, bare, 
steep, and extremely elevated granite ridge, which connects the 
Valley with the High Sierra, and of which something more will be 
said in the next chapter. The canon Qf the Tenaya Fork is diffi- 
cult to climb through, owing to the great pile of angular fragments 
of rock with which it is obstructed. It has formerly been traversed 
occasionally by persons desiring to reach the Big Oak Flat trail to 
Mono Lake ; but now it is much easier to take the trail up Indian 
Cafion, which has the advantage of being passable for animals, 
while the Tenaya Cafion is not. 

The Indian Canon trail is steep and rough, though not at all 
dangerous. It affords a convenient way by which to reach the 
Tuolumne Canon and the region of Mount Hoffmann, although it 
has thus far been principally used for excursions to the summit of 
the Yosemite Falls. It was last year a free trail. 

We return now to the canon of the main Merced River, which 
also has its own peculiar wonders to disclose. Leaving the Yose- 
mite Valley proper, at the angle spoken of before, where the 
three caiions unite, we follow up the Merced, soon crossing the 
Illilouette, which carries perhaps a third or a quarter as much 

1 A model of the Half Dome, on a scale of 300 feet to the inch, was made by Mr. 
Hoffmann, under the direction of the writer of this volume, and by him presented to 
Woodward's Garden in San Francisco, where it may be studied by those who feel 
an interest in mountain forms. 



1 6 THE YO SEMITE VALLEY 

water as the main river. Rising rapidly on a trail which runs 
along near the river, over the talus of great angular masses fallen 
from above, we ride a little less than a mile, and nearly to the 
base of the first of the two great falls made by the Merced in 
coming down from the level of the plateau above into the Yosemite 
Valley, In doing this, the river descends, in two miles, over 
2000 feet, making, besides innumerable cascades, two grand 
falls, which are among the greater attractions of the Yosemite, 
not only on account of their height and the large body of water in 
the river during most of the season, but also on account of the 
stupendous scenery in the midst of which they are placed. 

The first fall reached in ascending the caiion is the Vernal, a 
perpendicular sheet of water with a descent varying greatly with 
the season. Our measurements give all the way from 315 to 475 
feet for the vertical height of the fall, between the months of June 
and October. The reason of these discrepancies seems to lie in 
the fact that the rock near the bottom is steeply incHned, so 
that a precise definition of the place where the perpendicular part 
ceases is very difficult amid the bUnding spray and foam. As the 
body of water increases, the force of the fall is greater, and of 
course it is thrown farthest forward when the mass of water is 
greatest. Probably it is near the truth to call the height of the 
fall, at the average stage of water in June or July, 400 feet. 
The rock behind this fall is a perfectly square cut mass of 
granite extending across the caiion, and it is wonderful to see, 
at low water, how little the eroding eff"ect of the river has had to 
do with the formation of the canon and fall. It would seem as if 
causes now in action had little or nothing to do with the formation 
of this step in the descent of the Merced to any valley below. 

The path up the side of the canon near the fall winds around 
and along a steeply sloping mountain side, always wet with the 
spray, and consequently rather slippery in places. Ladies, how- 
ever, find no great difficulty in passing, with the aid of friendly 
arms, 'and protected by stout boots and india-rubber clothing 
brought from the hotel. The perpendicular part of the ascent 
is surmounted by the aid of a substantial and well-protected stair- 
case, which has lately taken the place of the former somewhat 
dangerous ladders. At the summit of the fall the view down the 



JOSIAH D WIGHT WHITNEY 1 7 

canon, as well as in the opposite direction, is extremely fine. A 
remarkable parapet of granite runs along the edge of Vernal Fall 
for some distance, just breast-high, and looking as if made on 
purpose to afford the visitor a secure position from which to enjoy 
the scene. 

From the Vernal Fall up stream, for the distance of about a 
mile, the river may be followed, and it presents a succession of 
cascades and rapids of great beauty. As we approach the Nevada 
Fall, the last great one of the Merced, we have at every step 
something new and impressive. On the left hand, or north side 
of the river, is the Cap of Liberty, a stupendous mass of rock, 
isolated and nearly perpendicular on all sides, rising perhaps 
2000 feet above its base, and little inferior to the Half Dome 
in grandeur. It has been frequently climbed, and without difficulty, 
although appearing so inaccessible from the caiion of the Merced. 

The Nevada Fall is, in every respect, one of the grandest 
waterfalls in the world, whether we consider its vertical height, 
the purity and volume of the river which forms it, or the stupen- 
dous scenery by which it is environed. The fall is not quite 
perpendicular, as there is near the summit a ledge of rock which 
receives a portion of the water, and throws it off with a peculiar 
twist, adding considerably to the general picturesque effect. A 
determination of the height of the fall was not easy, on account 
of the blinding spray at the bottom, and the uncertainty of the 
exact spot where the water strikes. Indeed, this seems to vary 
in the Nevada as well, although not so much, as in the Vernal 
Fall. Our measurements made the Nevada from 591 to 639 
feet, at different times and seasons. To call the Vernal 400 and 
the Nevada 600 feet, in round numbers, will be near enough to 
the truth. The descent of the river in the rapids between the 
two falls is nearly 300 feet. 

In the canon of the South Fork, or lUilouette, there is a fine 
fiiU estimated at 600 feet high. It is seen from a point on the 
trail from the hotel to Mirror Lake, although but rarely visited by 
travellers, the canon being rough and difficult to climb. A trail 
should be made up this gorge, to give access to the fall, and to 
the superb views to be had of the back of the Half Dome, the 
Vernal Fall, and other interesting points, 
c 



1 8 LANDOR'S COTTAGE 

Having thus run rapidly through the Ust of objects in the 
Valley best known and most likely to be visited, we will give a 
more systematic and general account of the Yosemite, — its botany, 
topography, and geology; this will enable us to bring forward 
some interesting considerations which could not so well be intro- 
duced in a detailed enumeration, in a geographical order, of the 
points of interest. 



LANDOR'S COTTAGE 

EDGAR ALLAN POE 

[A part of an imaginary sketch, entitled Landor^s Cottage, published in his 
Works, 1850.] 

The little vale into which I thus peered down from under the 
fog-canopy could not have been more than four hundred yards 
long ; while in breadth it varied from fifty to one hundred and 
fifty, or perhaps two hundred. It was most narrow at its northern 
extremity, opening out as it tended southwardly, but with no very 
precise regularity. The widest portion was within eighty yards of 
the southern extreme. The slopes which encompassed the vale 
could not fairly be called hills, unless at their northern face. 
Here a precipitous ledge of granite arose to a height of some ninety 
feet ; and, as I have mentioned, the valley at this point was not 
more than fifty feet wide ; but as the visitor proceeded south- 
wardly from this cHff, he found, on his right hand and on his left, 
declivities at once less high, less precipitous, and less rocky. All, 
in a word, sloped and softened to the south ; and yet the whole 
vale was engirdled by eminences, more or less high, except at two 
points. One of these I have already spoken of. It lay consider- 
ably to the north of west, and was where the setting sun made its 
way, as^ I have before described, into the amphitheatre, through a 
cleanly cut natural cleft in the granite embankment : this fissure 
might have been ten yards wide at its widest point, so far as the 
eye could trace it. It seemed to lead up, up, like a natural cause- 
way, into the recesses of unexplored mountains and forests. The 
other opening was directly at the southern end of the vale. Here, 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 



19 



generally, the slopes were nothing more than gentle inclinations, 
extending from east to west about one hundred and fifty yards. 
In the middle of this extent was a depression, level with the ordi- 
nary floor of the valley. As regards vegetation, as well as in 
respect to everything else, the scene softened and sloped to the 
south. To the north — on the craggy precipice — a few paces from 
the verge — upsprang the magnificent trunks of numerous hickories, 
black walnuts, and chestnuts, interspersed with occasional oak ; 
and the strong lateral branches thrown out by the walnuts, espe- 
cially, spread far over the edge of the cliff. Proceeding south- 
wardly, the explorer saw at first the same class of trees, but less 
and less lofty and Salvatorish ^ in character ; then he saw the 
gentler elm, succeeded by the sassafras and locust — these again 
by the softer linden, red-bud, catalpa, and maple — these yet 
again by still more graceful and more modest varieties. The 
whole face of the southern declivity was covered with wild shrub- 
bery alone — an occasional silver willow or white poplar excepted. 
In the bottom of the valley itself — (for it must be borne in mind 
that the vegetation hitherto mentioned grew only on the cliffs or 
hillsides) — were to be seen three insulated trees. One was an elm 
of fine size and exquisite form : it stood guard over the southern 
gate of the vale. Another was a hickory, much larger than the 
elm, and altogether a much finer tree, although both were exceed- 
ingly beautiful : it seemed to have taken charge of the north- 
western entrance, springing from a group of rocks in the very jaws 
of the ravine, and throwing its graceful body, at an angle of nearly 
forty-five degrees, far out into the sunshine of the amphitheatre. 
About thirty yards east of this tree stood, however, the pride of 
the valley, and beyond all question the most magnificent tree I 
have ever seen, unless, perhaps, among the cypresses of Itchia- 
tuckanee. It was a triple-stemmed tulip tree — the Lirio- 
dendi-on Tulipiferum — one of the natural order of magnolias. Its 
three trunks separated from the parent at about three feet from 
the soil and, diverging very slightly and gradually, were not more 
than four feet apart at the point where the largest stem shot out 
into the foliage : this was at an elevation of about eighty feet. 

1 [Salvator was more well known then than now as an Italian painter of wildly 
romantic scenery.] 



20 LANDOR'S COTTAGE 

The whole height of the principal division was one hundred and 
twenty feet. Nothing can surpass in beauty the form or the 
glossy, vivid green of the leaves of the tulip tree. In the present 
instance they were fully eight inches wide ; but their glory was 
altogether eclipsed by the gorgeous splendor of the profuse blos- 
soms. Conceive, closely congregated, a million of the largest and i 
most resplendent tulips ! Only thus can the reader get any idea 
of the picture I would convey. And then the stately grace of the 
clean, delicately-granulated columnar stems, the largest four feet 
in diameter, at twenty from the ground. The innumerable blos- 
soms, mingling with those of other trees scarcely less beautiful, 
although infinitely less majestic, filled the valley with more than 
Arabian perfumes. 

The general floor of the amphitheatre was grass of the same 
character as that I had found in the road : if anything, more de- 
liciously soft, thick, velvety, and miraculously green. It was hard 
to conceive how all this beauty had been attained. 

I have spoken of the two openings into the vale. From the 
one to the northwest issued a rivulet, which came, gently mur- 
muring and slightly foaming, down the ravine, until it dashed 
against the group of rocks out of which sprang the insulated hick- 
ory. Here, after encircling the tree, it passed on, a little to the 
north of east, leaving the tulip tree some twenty feet to the south, 
and making no decided alteration in its course until it came near 
the midway between the eastern and western boundaries of the 
valley. At this point, after a series of sweeps, it turned off at 
right angles and pursued a generally southern direction — mean- 
dering as it went — until it became lost in a small lake of irregular 
figure (although roughly oval), that lay gleaming near the lower 
extremity of the vale. This lakelet was, perhaps, a hundred yards 
in diameter at its widest part. No crystal could be clearer than 
its waters. Its bottom, which could be distinctly seen, consisted 
altogej;her of pebbles brilliantly white. Its banks, of the emerald 
grass already described, roimded, rather than sloped, off into the 
clear heaven below ; and so clear was this heaven, so perfectly, at 
times, did it reflect all objects above it, that where the true bank 
ended and where the mimic one commenced, it was a point of no 
little difificulty to determine. The trout, and some other varieties 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 21 

of fish, with which this pond seemed to be almost inconveniently 
crowded, had all the appearance of veritable flying-fish. It was 
almost impossible to believe that they were not absolutely sus- 
pended in the air. A light birch canoe, that lay placidly on the 
water, was reflected in its minutest fibres with a, fidelity unsur- 
passed by the most exquisitely polished mirror. A small island, 
fairly laughing with flowers in full bloom, and affording little more 
space than just enough for a picturesque little building, seemingly 
a fowl-house, arose from the lake not far from its northern shore, 
to which it was connected by means of an inconceivably light- 
looking and yet very primitive bridge. It was formed of a single 
broad and thick plank of the tulip wood. This was forty feet long, 
and spanned the interval between shore and shore with a slight 
but very perceptible arch, preventing all oscillation. From the 
southern extreme of the lake issued a continuation of the rivulet, 
which, after meandering for perhaps thirty yards, finally passed 
through the " depression " (already described) in the middle of 
the southern declivity, and tumbling down a sheer precipice of a 
hundred feet, made its devious and unnoticed way to the Hudson. 

The lake was deep — at some points thirty feet — but the 
rivulet seldom exceeded three, while its greatest width was about 
eight. Its bottom and banks were as those of the pond — if a 
defect could have been attributed to them, in point of pictur- 
esqueness, it was that of excessive neatness. 

The expanse of the green turf was relieved, here and there, 
by an occasional showy shrub, such as the hydrangea, or the 
common snowball, or the aromatic seringa ; or, more frequently, 
by a clump of geraniums blossoming gorgeously in great varieties. 
These latter grew in pots which were carefully buried in the soil, 
so as to give the plants the appearance of being indigenous. 
Besides all this, the lawn's velvet was exquisitely spotted with 
sheep — a considerable flock of which roamed about the vale, in 
company with three tamed deer, and a vast number of brilliantly- 
plumed ducks. A very large mastiff seemed to be in vigilant 
attendance upon these animals, each and all. 

Along the eastern and western cliffs — where, towards the 
upper portion of the amphitheatre, the boundaries were more or 
less precipitous — grew ivy in great profusion — so that only here 



22 LAND OR' S COTTAGE 

and there could even a glimpse of the naked rock be obtained. 
The northern precipice, in like manner, was almost entirely clothed 
by grapevines of rare luxuriance ; some springing from the soil 
at the base of the cHff, and others from ledges on its face. 

The slight elevation which formed the lower boundary of this 
little domain was crowned by a neat stone wall, of sufficient height 
to prevent the escape of the deer. Nothing of the fence kind was 
observable elsewhere ; for nowhere else was an artificial enclosure 
needed : — any stray sheep, for example, which should attempt to 
make its way out of the vale by means of the ravine, would find 
its progress arrested, after a few yards' advance, by the precipitous 
ledge of rock over which tumbled the cascade that had arrested 
my attention as I first drew near the domain. In short, the only 
ingress or egress was through a grate occupying a rocky pass in 
the road, a few paces below the point at which I stopped to 
reconnoitre the scene. 

I have described the brook as meandering very irregularly 
through the whole of its course. Its two general directions, as I 
have said, were first from west to east, and then from north to 
south. At the turn, the stream, sweeping backwards, made an 
almost circular loop, so as to form a peninsula, which was very 
nearly an island, and which included about the sixteenth of an 
acre. On this peninsula stood a dwelling-house — and when I say 
that this house, like the infernal terrace seen by Vathek,^ " ctait 
d'une architecture i7iconnue dans les annates de la terre^'' - 1 mean, 
merely, that its tout etisetnble struck me with the keenest sense of 
combined novelty and propriety — in a word, of poetry (for, than 
in the words just employed, I could scarcely give, of poetry in the 
abstract, a more rigorous definition) — and I do not mean that 
the merely outre was perceptible in any respect. 

In fact, nothing could well be more simple, more utterly un- 
pretending, than this cottage. Its marvellous effect lay altogether 
in it3 artistic arrangement as a picture. I could have fancied, 
while I looked at it, that some eminent landscape-painter had 
built it with his brush. 

The point of view from which I first saw the valley was not 

1 [The hero of Beckford's romance of the same name.] 

2 [Was of an architecture unknown in the annais of the earth.] 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE 



23 



altogether, although it was nearly, the best point from which to 
survey the house. I will therefore describe it as I afterwards saw 
it — from a position on the stone wall at the southern extreme of 
the amphitheatre. 

The main building was about twenty-four feet long and sixteen 
broad — certainly not more. Its total height, from the ground to the 
apex of the roof, could not have exceeded eighteen feet. To the 
west end of this structure was attached one about a third smaller 
in all its proportions : — the Une of its front standing back about 
two yards from that of the larger house ; and the line of its roof, 
of course, being considerably depressed below that of the roof 
adjoining. At right angles to these buildings, and from the rear 
of the main one, not exactly in the middle, extended a third com- 
partment, very small — being, in general, one-third less than the 
western wing. The roofs of the two larger were very steep — 
sweeping down from the ridge-beam with a long concave curve, 
and extending at least four feet beyond the walls in front, so as 
to form the roofs of two piazzas. These latter roofs, of course, 
needed no support ; but as they had the air of needing it, shght 
and perfectly plain pillars were inserted at the corners alone. 
The roof of the northern wing was merely an extension of a por- 
tion of the main roof. Between the chief building and western 
wing arose a very tall and rather slender square chimney of hard 
Dutch bricks, alternately black and red: — a slight cornice of 
projecting bricks at the top. Over the gables the roofs also pro- 
jected very much : — in the main building, about four feet to the 
east and two to the west. The principal door was not exactly 
in the main division, being a little to the east — while the two win- 
dows were to the west. These latter did not extend to the floor, 
but were much longer and narrower than usual — they had single 
shutters like doors — the panes were of lozenge form, but quite 
large. The door itself had its upper half of glass, also in lozenge 
panes — a movable shutter secured it at night. The door to the 
west wing was in its gable, and quite simple — a single window 
looked out to the south. There was no external door to the north 
wing, and it, also, had only one window to the east. 

The blank wall of the eastern gable was relieved by stairs (with 
a balustrade) running diagonally across it — the ascent being from 



24 LAND OR' S COTTAGE 

the south. Under cover of the widely projecting eave these steps 
gave access to a door leading into the garret, or rather loft — for it 
was lighted only by a single window to the north, and seemed to 
have been intended as a storeroom. 

The piazzas of the main building and western wing had no floors, 
as is usual ; but at the doors and at each window, large, flat, irregu- 
lar slabs of granite lay embedded in the delicious turf, aff"ording 
comfortable footing in all weather. Excellent paths of the same 
material — not nicely adapted, but with the velvety sod filling fre- 
quent intervals between the stones, led hither and thither from 
the house, to a crystal spring about five paces off, to the road, or 
to one or two outhouses that lay to the north, beyond the brook, 
and were thoroughly concealed by a few locusts and catalpas. 

Not more than six steps from the main door of the cottage 
stood the dead trunk of a fantastic pear tree, so clothed from head 
to foot in the gorgeous bignonia blossoms that one required no lit- 
tle scrutiny to determine what manner of sweet thing it could be. 
From various arms of this tree hung cages of different kinds. In 
one, a large wicker cylinder with a ring at top, revelled a mocking- 
bird ; in another, an oriole ; in a third, the impudent bobolink — 
while three or four more delicate prisons were loudly vocal with 
canaries. 

The pillars of the piazza were enwreathed in jasmine and sweet 
honeysuckle ; while from the angle formed by the main structure 
and its west wing, in front, sprang a grapevine of unexampled luxu- 
riance. Scorning all restraint, it had clambered first to the lower 
roof — then to the higher ; and along the ridge of this latter it con- 
tinued to writhe on, throwing out tendrils to the right and left, 
until at length it fairly attained the east gable, and fell trailing over 
the stairs. 

The whole house, with its wings, was constructed of the old- 
fashioned Dutch shingles — broad, and with unrounded corners. 
It is, a peculiarity of this material to give houses built of it the 
appearance of being wider at bottom than at top — after the man- 
ner of Egyptian architecture ; and in the present instance this 
exceedingly picturesque effect was aided by numerous pots of gor- 
geous flowers that almost encompassed the base of the buildings. 

The shingles were painted a dull gray ; and the happiness with 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 25 

which this neutral tint melted into the vivid green of the tulip 
tree leaves that partially overshadowed the cottage can readily 
be conceived by an artist. 

From the position near the stone wall, as described, the build- 
ings were seen at great advantage — for the southeastern angle was 
thrown forward — so that the eye took in at once the whole of the 
two fronts, with the picturesque eastern gable, and at the same 
time obtained just a sufficient glimpse of the northern wing, with 
parts of a pretty roof to the spring-house, and nearly half of a light 
bridge that spanned the brook in the near vicinity of the main 
buildings. 

ST. MARK'S 

JOHN RUSKIN 

[From chapter 4, volume ii, of The Stones of Venice, 185 1-3.] 

And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St. 
Mark's Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet 
English cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its 
cathedral. Let us go together up the more retired street, at the 
end of which we can see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and 
then through the low grey gateway, with its battlemented top and 
small latticed window in the centre, into the inner private-looking 
road or close, where nothing goes in but the carts of the trades- 
men who supply the bishop and the chapter, and where there are 
little shaven grassplots, fenced in by neat rails, before old-fashioned 
groups of somewhat diminutive and excessively trim houses, with 
little oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there, and deep 
wooden cornices and eaves painted cream color and white, and 
small porches to their doors in the shape of cockle-shells, or little, 
crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables warped a little on 
one side ; and so forward till we come to larger houses, also old- 
fashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind them, and 
fruit walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines, the 
vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft, and looking in front on 
the cathedral square itself, laid out in rigid divisions of smooth 
grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheerful, especially on the sunny 



26 ST. MARK'S 

side where the canons' children are walking with their nursery- 
maids. And so, taking care not to tread on the grass, we will go 
along the straight walk to the west front, and there stand for a 
time, looking up at its deep-pointed porches and the dark places 
between their pillars, where there were statues once, and where the 
fragments, here and there, of a stately figure are still left, which has 
in it the hkeness of a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, per- 
haps a saintly king long ago in heaven ; and so higher and higher 
up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused 
arcades, shattered, and grey, and grisly with heads of dragons and 
mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into yet 
unseemher shape, and coloured on their stony scales by the deep 
russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold ; and so, higher still, to the 
bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the 
bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only 
sees like a drift of eddying black points, now closing, now scatter- 
ing, and now setthng suddenly into invisible places among the 
bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill the whole 
square with that strange clangour of theirs, so harsh and yet so 
soothing, like the cries of birds on a solitary coast between the 
cliffs and sea. 

Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its 
small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its 
secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the 
sense and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be 
regulated by the cathedral clock ; and weigh the influence of 
those dark towers on all who have passed through the lonely square 
at their feet for centuries, and on all who have seen them rising 
far away over the wooded plain, or catching on their square masses 
the last rays of the sunset, when the city at their feet was indicated 
only by the mist at the bend of the river. And then let us quickly 
recollect that we are in Venice, and land at the extremity of the 
Calle J^unga San Moise, which may be considered as there answer- 
ing to the secluded street that led us to our English cathedral 
gateway. 

We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide where 
it is widest, full of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant sales- 
men, — a shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of 



JOHN RUSK IN 27 

brazen ringing, all the worse for its confinement between the high 
houses of the passage along which we have to make our way. 
Overhead an inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron 
balconies and chimney flues pushed out on brackets to save room, 
and arched windows with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and 
gleams of green leaves here and there where a fig-tree branch 
escapes over a lower wall from some inner cortile, leading the eye 
up to the narrow stream of blue sky high over all. On each side, 
a row of shops, as densely set as may be, occupying, in fact, inter- 
vals between the square stone shafts, about eight feet high, which 
carry the first floors : intervals of which one is narrow and serves 
as a door ; the other is, in the more respectable shops, wainscoted 
to the height of the counter and glazed above, but in those of the 
poorer tradesmen left open to the ground, and the wares laid on 
benches and tables in the open air, the light in all cases entering 
at the front only, and fading away in a few feet from the threshold 
into a gloom which the eye from without cannot penetrate, but 
which is generally broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp at 
the back of the shop, suspended before a print of the Virgin. The 
less pious shopkeeper sometimes leaves his lamp unlighted, and is 
contented with a penny print ; the more religious one has his print 
coloured and set in a little shrine with a gilded or figured fringe, 
with perhaps a faded flower or two on each side, and his lamp 
burning brilliantly. Here at the fruiterer's, where the dark-green 
water-melons are heaped upon the counter like cannon-balls, the 
Madonna has a tabernacle of fresh laurel leaves ; but the pewterer 
next door has let his lamp out, and there is nothing to be seen in 
his shop but the dull gleam of the studded patterns on the cop- 
per pans, hanging from his roof in the darkness. Next comes a 
"Vendita Frittole e Liquori," ^ where the Virgin, enthroned in a 
very humble manner beside a tallow candle on a back shelf, pre- 
sides over certain ambrosial morsels of a nature too ambiguous to 
be defined or enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at the 
regular wine-shop of the calle, where we are offered "Vino Nos- 
trani a Soldi 28.32,"- the Madonna is in great glory, enthroned 
above ten or a dozen large red casks of three-year-old vintage, and 

1 [Shop for cakes and liquors.] 

2 [Nostrani wine at so many soldi (cents) .] 



28 ST. MARK'S 

flanked by goodly ranks of bottles of Maraschino, and two crimson 
lamps ; and for the evening, when the gondoHers will come to 
drink out, under her auspices, the money they have gained during 
the day, she will have a whole chandelier. 

A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle, 
and, glancing as we pass through the square door of marble, 
deeply moulded in the outer wall, we see the shadows of its 
pergola of vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield 
carved on its side ; and so presently emerge on the bridge and 
Campo San Mois^, whence to the entrance into St. Mark's Place, 
called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the square), the Venetian 
character is nearly destroyed, first by the frightful fagade of San 
Mois^j which we will pause at another time to examine, and then 
by the modernizing of the shops as they near the piazza, and the 
mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging groups of 
English and Austrians. We will push fast through them into the 
shadow of the pillars at the end of the " Bocca di Piazza," and 
then we forget them all ; for between those pillars there opens a 
great light, and, in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast 
tower of St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level 
field of chequered stones ; and, on each side, the countless arches 
prolong themselves into ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and 
irregular houses that pressed together above us in the dark alley 
had been struck back into sudden obedience and lovely order, 
and all their rude casements and broken walls had been trans- 
formed into arches charged with goodly sculpture, and fluted 
shafts of dehcate stone. 

And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered 
arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great 
square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we 
may see it far away ; — a multitude of pillars and white domes, 
clustered into a lojjg, low pyramid of coloured light; a treasure- 
heap, 'it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of- 
pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled 
with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as 
amber and delicate as ivory, — sculpture fantastic and involved, 
of palm leaves and liHes, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds 
clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together 



JOHN RUSK IN 29 

into an endless network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst of 
it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, 
and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct 
among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves 
beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it 
faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were 
angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches 
there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and 
deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, 
that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine. Cleopatralike, 
" their bluest veins to kiss " — the shadow, as it steals back from 
them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding 
tide leaves the waved sand ; their capitals rich with interwoven 
tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus 
and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the 
Cross ; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous 
chain of language and of life — angels, and the signs of heaven, 
and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon the 
earth ; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, 
mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers, — a confusion 
of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen 
blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's 
Lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in 
ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and 
toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of 
sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been 
frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them 
with coral and amethyst. 

Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an inter- 
val ! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them ; 
for, instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, 
drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of 
doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft 
iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every motion, with 
the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven 
hundred years. 



30 THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 

W. H. HUDSON 
[From chapter 13 of Idle Days in Patagonia^ 1893.] 

Near the end of Darwin's famous narrative of the voyage of 
the Beagle there is a passage which, for me, has a very special 
interest and significance. It is as follows, and the italicization 
is mine : — " In calling up images of the past, I find the plains of 
Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes ; yet these plains are 
pronounced by all to be most wretched and useless. They are 
characterized only by negative possessions ; without habitations, 
without water, without trees, without mountains, they support only 
a few dwarf plants. Why, then — ajid the case is not peculiar to 
myself — have these arid wastes taken so firm possession of my 
nmid? Why have not the still more level, the greener and more 
fertile pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced an 
equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these feelings, but it 
must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination. 
The plains of Patagonia are boundless, for they are scarcely practi- 
cable, and hence unknown ; they bear the stamp of having thus 
lasted for ages, and there appears no limit to their duration through 
future time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was sur- 
rounded by an impassable breadth of water, or by deserts heated 
to an intolerable excess, who would not look at these last bound- 
aries to man's knowledge with deep but ill-defined sensations ? " 

That he did not in this passage hit on the right explanation of 
the sensations he experienced in Patagonia, and of the strength 
of the impressions it made on his mind, I am quite convinced ; 
for the thing is just as true of to-day as of the time, in 1836, 
when he wrote that the case was not peculiar to himself. Yet 
since that date — which now, thanks to Darwin, seems so remote 
to the naturalist — those desolate regions have ceased to be imprac- 
ticable, and, although still uninhabited and uninhabitable, except 
to a few nomads, they are no longer unknown. During the last 
twenty years the country has been crossed in various directions, 
from the Atlantic to the Andes, and from the Rio Negro to the 



JV. H. HUDSON 31 

Straits of Magellan, and has been found all barren. The myste- 
rious illusive city, peopled by whites, which was long believed to 
exist in the unknown interior, in a valley called Trapalanda, is to 
moderns a myth, a mirage of the mind, as little to the traveller's 
imagination as the glittering capital of great Manoa, which Alonzo 
Pizarro and his false friend Orellana failed to discover. The trav- 
eller of to-day really expects to see nothing more exciting than 
a solitary huanaco keeping watch on a hill-top, and a few grey- 
plumaged rheas flying from him, and, possibly, a band of long- 
haired roving savages, with their faces painted black and red. 
Yet, in spite of accurate knowledge, the old charm still exists in 
all its freshness ; and after all the discomforts and sufferings 
endured in a desert cursed with eternal barrenness, the returned 
traveller finds in after years that it still keeps its hold on him, 
that it shines brighter in memory, and is dearer to him than any 
other region he may have visited. 

We know that the more deeply our feelings are moved by any 
scene the more vivid and lasting will its image be in memory — 
a fact which accounts for the comparatively unfading character 
of the images that date back to the period of childhood, when 
we are most emotional. Judging from my own case, I believe 
that we have here the secret of the persistence of Patagonian 
images, and their frequent recurrence in the minds of many who 
have visited that grey, monotonous, and, in one sense, eminently 
uninteresting region. It is not the effect of the unknown, it is 
not imagination ; it is that nature in these desolate scenes, for a 
reason to be guessed at by and by, moves us more deeply than 
in others. In describing his rambles in one of the most desolate 
spots in Patagonia, Darwin remarks : " Yet, in passing over these 
scenes, without one bright object near, an ill-defined but strong 
sense of pleasure is vividly excited." When I recall a Patagonian 
scene, it comes before me so complete in all its vast extent, with 
all its details so clearly outlined, that, if I were actually gazing on 
it, I could scarcely see it more distinctly ; yet other scenes, even 
those that were beautiful and sublime, with forest, and ocean, and 
mountain, and over all the deep blue sky and brilliant sunshine 
of the tropics, appear no longer distinct and entire in memory, 
and only become more broken and clouded if any attempt is 



32 THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 

made to regard them attentively. Here and there I see a wooded 
mountain, a grove of pahiis, a flowery tree, green waves dashing 
on a rocky shore — nothing but isolated patches of bright colour, 
the parts of the picture that have not faded on a great blurred 
canvas, or series of canvases. These last are images of scenes 
which were looked on with wonder and admiration — feelings which 
the Patagonian wastes could not inspire — but the grey, monoto- 
nous solitude woke other and deeper feelings, and in that mental 
state the scene was indelibly impressed on the mind. 

I spent the greater part of one winter at a point on the Rio 
Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea, where the valley on 
my side of the water was about five miles wide. The valley alone 
was habitable, where there was water for man and beast, and a 
thin soil producing grass and grain ; it is perfectly level, and ends 
abruptly at the foot of the bank or terrace-like formation of the 
higher barren plateau. It was my custom to go out every morn- 
ing on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride 
away from the valley ; and no sooner would I climb the terrace 
and plunge into the grey universal thicket, than I would find my- 
self as completely alone and cut off from all sight and sound of 
human occupancy as if five hundred instead of only five miles 
separated me from the hidden green valley and river. So wild 
and solitary and remote seemed that grey waste, stretching away 
into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild 
animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in 
the wilderness of thorns. There I might have dropped down and 
died, and my flesh been devoured by birds, and my bones bleached 
white in sun and wind, and no person would have found them, 
and it would have been forgotten that one had ridden forth in the 
morning and had not returned. Or if, like the few wild animals 
there — puma, huanaco, and harelike dolichotis, or Darwin's 
rhea and the crested tinamou among the birds — I had been able 
to exist without water, I might have made myself a hermitage of 
brushwood or dug-out in the side of a cliff, and dwelt there until 
I had grown grey as the stones and trees around me, and no 
human foot would have stumbled on my hiding-place. 

Not once, nor twice, nor thrice, but day after day I returned to 
this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, 



IV. H. HUDSON 33 

and leaving it only wlien hunger and thirst and the westering sun 
compelled me. And yet I had no object in going — no motive 
which could be put into words ; for although I carried a gun, there 
was nothing to shoot — the shooting was all left behind in the 
valley. Sometimes a dolichotis, starting up at my approach, 
flashed for one moment on my sight, to vanish the next moment 
in the continuous thicket ; or a covey of tinamous sprang rocket- 
like into the air, and fled away with long wailing note and loud 
whur of wings ; or on some distant hillside a bright patch of 
yellow, of a deer that was watching me, appeared and remained 
motionless for two or three minutes. But the animals were few, 
and sometimes I would pass an entire day without seeing one 
mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. 
The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a grey film 
of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough 
to make my bridle hand feel quite numb. Moreover, it was not 
possible to enjoy a canter ; the bushes grew so close together that 
it was as much as one could do to pass through at a walk without 
brushing against them ; and at this slow pace, which would have 
seemed intolerable in other circumstances, I would ride about for 
hours at a stretch. In the scene itself there was nothing to delight 
the eye. Everywhere through the light, grey mould, grey as ashes 
and formed by the ashes of myriads of generations of dead trees, 
where the wind had blown on it, or the rain had washed it away, 
the underlying yellow sand appeared, and the old ocean- polished 
pebbles, dull red, and grey, and green, and yellow. On arriving 
at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to sur- 
vey the prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undu- 
lations ; but the undulations were wild and irregular ; the hills 
were rounded and cone-shaped, they were solitary and in groups 
and ranges ; some sloped gently, others were ridgelike and 
stretched away in league-long terraces, with other terraces beyond ; 
and all alike were clothed in the grey everlasting thorny vegeta- 
tion. How grey it all was ! hardly less so near at hand than on 
the haze-wrapped horizon, where the hills were dim and the out- 
line blurred by distance. Sometimes I would see the large eagle- 
like, white-breasted buzzard, Buteo erythronotus, perched on the 
summit of a bush half a mile away ; and so long as it would con- 



34 THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 

tinue stationed motionless before me my eyes would remain invol- 
untarily fixed on it, just as one keeps his eyes on a bright light 
shining in the gloom ; for the whiteness of the hawk seemed to 
exercise a fascinating power on the vision, so surpassingly bright was 
it by contrast in the midst of that universal unrelieved greyness. 
Descending from my look-out, I would take up my aimless wan- 
derings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same land- 
scape from another point ; and so on for hours, and at noon I would 
dismount and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. 
One day, in these rambles, I discovered a small grove composed of 
twenty to thirty trees, about eighteen feet high, and taller than 
the surrounding trees. They were growing at a convenient dis- 
tance apart, and had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer 
or other wild animals for a very long time, for the boles were 
polished to a glassy smoothness with much rubbing, and the ground 
beneath was trodden to a floor of clean, loose yellow sand. This 
grove was on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neigh- 
bourhood, so that it was easy for me to find it on other occasions ; 
and after a time I made a point of finding and using it as a rest- 
ing-place every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made 
choice of that one spot, sometimes going miles out of my way to 
sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the millions of 
trees and bushes covering the country, on any other hillside. I 
thought nothing at all about it, but acted unconsciously ; only 
afterwards, when revolving the subject, it seemed to me that after 
having rested there once, each time I wished to rest again the 
wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of 
trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath ; and in 
a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal-like, to repose 
at that same spot. 

It was perhaps a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest, 
since I was never tired : and yet without being tired, that noon- 
day payse, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was 
strangely grateful. All day the silence seemed grateful, it was 
very perfect, very profound. There were no insects, and the only 
bird sound — a feeble chirp of alarm emitted by a small skulking 
wrenlike species — was not heard oftenfer than two or three times 
an hour. The only sounds as I rode were the muffled hoof-strokes 



IV. H. HUDSON 35 

of my horse, scratching of twigs against my boot or saddle-flap, 
and the low panting of the dog. And it seemed to be a relief to 
escape even from these sounds when I dismounted and sat down : 
for in a few moments the dog would stretch his head out on his 
paws and go to sleep, and then there would be no sound, not even 
the rustle of a leaf. For unless the wind blows strong there is no 
fluttering motion and no whisper in the small stiff undeciduous 
leaves ; and the bushes stand unmoving as if carved out of stone. 
One day while listening to the silence, it occurred to my mind to 
wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This 
seemed at the time a horrible suggestion of fancy, a " lawless and 
uncertain thought " which almost made me shudder, and I was 
anxious to dismiss it quickly from my mind. But during those 
solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my 
mind ; animal forms did not cross my vision or bird-voices assail 
my hearing more rarely. In that novel state of mind I was in, 
thought had become impossible. Elsewhere I had always been 
able to think most freely on horseback ; and on the pampas, even 
in the most lonely places, my mind was always most active when 
I travelled at a swinging gallop. This was doubtless habit ; but 
now, with a horse under me, I had become incapable of reflection : 
my mind had suddenly transformed itself from a thinking machine 
into a machine for some other unknown purpose. To think was 
like setting in motion a noisy engine in my brain ; and there was 
something there which bade me be still, and I was forced to obey. 
My state was one of suspense and watchfulness ; yet I had no 
expectation of meeting with an adventure, and felt as free from 
apprehension as I feel now when sitting in a room in London. 
The change in me was just as great and wonderful as if I had 
changed my identity for that of another man or animal ; but at 
the time I was powerless to wonder at or speculate about it ; the 
state seemed familiar rather than strange, and although accom- 
panied by a strong feeling of elation, I did not know it — did not 
know that something had come between me and my intellect — 
until I lost it and returned to my former self — to thinking, and 
the old insipid existence. 

Such changes in us, however brief in duration they may be, and 
in most cases they are very brief, but which so long as they last 



36 THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 

seem to affect us down to the very roots of our being, and come 
as a great surprise — a revelation of an unfamiliar and unsuspected 
nature hidden under the nature we are conscious of — can only 
be attributed to an instantaneous reversion to the primitive and 
wholly savage mental conditions. . . . 

It is true that we are eminently adaptive, that we have created, 
and exist in some sort of harmony with new conditions, widely 
different from those to which we were originally adapted ; but the 
old harmony was infinitely more perfect than the new, and if there 
be such a thing as historical memory in us, it is not strange that 
the sweetest moment in any life, pleasant or dreary, should be 
when Nature draws near to it, and, taking up her neglected instru- 
ment, plays a fragment of some ancient melody, long unheard on 
the earth. 

It might be asked : If nature has at times this peculiar effect 
on us, restoring instantaneously the old vanished harmony between 
organism and environment, why should it be experienced in a 
greater degree in the Patagonian desert than in other solitary 
places, — a desert which is waterless, where animal voices are sel- 
dom heard, and vegetation is grey instead of green? I can only 
suggest a reason for the effect being so much greater in my own 
case. In subtropical woods and thickets, and in wild forests in 
temperate regions, the cheerful verdure and bright colours of flower 
and insects, if we have acquired a habit of looking closely at these 
things, and the melody and noises of bird-life engage the senses ; 
there is movement and brightness ; new forms, animal and 
vegetable, are continually appearing, curiosity and expectation are 
excited, and the mind is so much occupied with novel objects that 
the effect of wild nature in its entirety is minimized. In Patagonia 
the monotony of the plains, or expanse of low hills, the universal 
unrelieved greyness of everything, and the absence of animal forms 
and objects new to the eye, leave the mind open and free to receive 
an impression of visible nature as a whole. One gazes on the 
prospect as on the sea, for it stretches away sealike without 
change, into infinitude ; but without the sparkle of water, the 
changes of hue which shadows and sunlight and nearness and dis- 
tance give, and motion of waves and white flash of foam. It has 
a look of antiquity, of desolation, of eternal peace, of a desert that 



tV. H. HUDSON 37 

has been a desert from of old and will continue a desert forever ; 
and we know that its only human inhabitants are a few wandering 
savages, who live by hunting as their progenitors have done for 
thousands of years. Again, in fertile savannahs and pampas there 
may appear no signs of human occupancy, but the traveller knows 
that eventually the advancing tide of humanity will come with its 
flocks and herds, and the ancient silence and desolation will be 
no more ; and this thought is like human companionship, and 
mitigates the eiTect of nature's wildness on the spirit. In Patago- 
nia no such thought or dream of the approaching changes to 
be wrought by human agency can affect the mind. There is no 
water there, the arid soil is sand and gravel — pebbles rounded by 
the action of ancient seas, before Europe was ; and nothing grows 
except the barren things that nature loves — thorns, and a few 
woody herbs, and scattered tufts of wiry bitter grass. 



THE WORLD'S END 

GEORGE BORROW 

[From volume ii, chapter 12, of The Bible in Spain; or the Journeys, 
Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman, in an Attempt to Circtir- 
late the Scriptures in the Peninsula^ 1843.] 

It was a beautiful autumnal morning when we left the choza 
[hut] and pursued our way to Corcuvion. I satisfied my host by 
presenting him with a couple of pesetas, and he requested as a 
favour, that if on our return we passed that way, and were over- 
taken by the night, we would again take up our abode beneath his 
roof. This I promised, at the same time determining to do my 
best to guard against the contingency ; as 'sleeping in the loft of a 
Gallegan hut, though preferable to passing the night on a moor or 
mountain, is anything but desirable. 

So we again started at a rapid pace along rough bridle-ways and 
footpaths, amidst furze and brushwood. In about an hour we 
obtained a view of the sea, and directed by a lad, whom we found 
on the moor employed in tending a few miserable sheep, we bent 



38 THE WORLD'S END 

our course to the northwest, and at length reached the brow of 
the eminence, where we stopped for some time to survey the 
prospect which opened before us. 

It was not without reason that the Latins gave the name of 
Finisterrae to this district. We had arrived exactly at such a place 
as in my boyhood I had pictured to myself as the termination of 
the world, beyond which there was a wild sea, or abyss, or chaos. 
I now saw far before me an immense ocean, and below me a long 
and irregular line of lofty and precipitous coast. Certainly in the 
whole world there is no bolder coast than the Gallegan shore, from 
the debouchement of the Minho to Cape Finisterra. It consists 
of a granite wall of savage mountain, for the most part serrated at 
the top, and occasionally broken, where bays and firths like those 
of Vigo and Pontevedra intervene, running deep into the land. 
These bays and firths are invariably of an immense depth, and 
sufficiently capacious to shelter the navies of the proudest maritime 
nations. 

There is an air of stern and savage grandeur in everything 
around, which strongly captivates the imagination. This savage 
coast is the first ghmpse of Spain which the voyager from the north 
catches, or he who has ploughed his way across the wide Atlantic : 
and well does it seem to realize all his visions of this strange land. 
" Yes," he exclaims, " this is indeed Spain — stern flinty Spain — 
land emblematic of those spirits to which she has given birth. 
From what land but that before me could have proceeded those 
portentous beings who astounded the Old World and filled the 
New with horror and blood : Alba and Philip, Cortez and Pizarro ; 
stern colossal spectres, looming through the gloom of bygone years, 
Hke yonder granite mountains through the haze upon the eye of 
the mariner. Yes, yonder is indeed Spain ; flinty, indomitable 
Spain ; land emblematic of its sons ! " 

As for myself, when I viewed that wide ocean and its savage 
shore,' I cried : " Such is the grave, and such are its terrific sides ; 
those moors and wilds, over which I have passed, are the rough 
and dreary journey of life. Cheered with hope, we struggle along 
through all the difficulties of moor, bog, and mountain, to arrive 
at — what ? The grave and its dreary sides. Oh, may hope not 
desert us in the last hour : hope in the Redeemer and in God ! " 



GEORGE BORROW 39 

VVe descended from the eminence, and again lost sight of the 
sea amidst ravines and dingles, amongst which patches of pine 
were occasionally seen. Continuing to descend, we at last came, 
not to the sea, but to the extremity of a long narrow firth, where 
stood a village or hamlet ; whilst at a small distance, on the western 
side of the firth, appeared one considerably larger, which was in- 
deed almost entitled to the appellation of town. This last was 
Corcuvion ; the first, if I forget not, was called Ria de Silla, We 
hastened on to Corcuvion, where I bade my guide make inquiries 
respecting Finisterra. He entered the door of a wine-house, 
from which proceeded much noise and vociferation, and presently 
returned, informing me that the village of Finisterra was distant 
about a league and a half. A man, evidently in a state of intoxi- 
cation, followed him to the door : " Are you bound for Finisterra, 
Cavalheiros [sirs] ? " he shouted. 

" Yes, my friend," I repHed, " we are going thither." 

" Then you are going amongst a flock of drunkards {fato de 
barrachos) ,'' he answered. "Take care they do not play you a 
trick." 

We passed on, and striking across a sandy peninsula at the back 
of the town, soon reached the shore of an immense bay, the north- 
westernmost end of which was formed by the far-famed cape of 
Finisterra, which we now saw before us stretching far into the sea. 

Along a beach of dazzling white sand, we advanced towards the 
cape, the bourne of our journey. The sun was shining brightly, 
and every object was illumined by his beams. The sea lay before 
us like a vast mirror, and the waves which broke upon the shore 
were so tiny as scarcely to produce a murmur. On we sped along 
the deep winding bay, overhung by gigantic hills and mountains. 
Strange recollections began to throng upon my mind. It was 
upon this beach that, according to the tradition of all ancient 
Christendom, Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, preached 
the gospel to the heathen Spaniards. Upon this beach had once 
stood an immense commercial city, the proudest of all Spain. 
This now desolate bay had once resounded with the voices of 
myriads, when the keels and commerce of all the then known 
world were wafted to Duyo. 

"What is the name of this village?" said I to a woman, as we 



40 THE WORLD'S END 

passed by five or six ruinous houses at the bend of the bay, ere we 
entered upon the peninsula of Finisterra. 

" This is no village," said the Gallegan, " this is no village, Sir 
Cavalier, this is a city, this is Duyo." 

So much for the glory of the world ! These huts were all that 
the roaring sea and the tooth of time had left of Duyo, the great 
city ! Onward now to Finisterra. 

It was midday when we reached the village of Finisterra, con- 
sisting of about one hundred houses, and built on the southern 
side of the peninsula, just before it rises into the huge bluff head 
which is called the Cape. We sought in vain for an inn or venta, 
where we might stable our beast ; at one moment we thought that 
we had found one, and had even tied the animal to the manger. 
Upon our going out, however, he was instantly untied and driven 
forth into the street. The few people whom we saw appeared to 
gaze upon us in a singular manner. We, however, took little 
notice of these circumstances, and proceeded along the straggling 
street until we found shelter in the house of a Castilian shopkeeper, 
whom some chance had brought to this corner of Galicia — this 
end of the world. Our first care was to feed the animal, who now 
began to exhibit considerable symptoms of fatigue. We then 
requested some refreshment for ourselves ; and in about an hour, 
a tolerably savory fish, weighing about three pounds, and fresh 
from the bay, was prepared for us by an old woman who appeared 
to officiate as housekeeper. Having finished our meal, I and my 
uncouth companion went forth and prepared to ascend the 
mountain. 

We stopped to examine a small, dismantled fort or battery facing 
the bay; and whilst engaged in this examination, it more than 
once occurred to me that we were ourselves the objects of scrutiny 
and investigation : indeed, I caught a glimpse of more than one 
countenance peering upon us through the holes and chasms of the 
walls. , We now commenced ascending Finisterra ; and making 
numerous and long detours, we wound our way up its flinty sides. 
The sun had reached the top of heaven, whence he showered upon 
us perpendicularly his brightest and fiercest rays. My boots were 
torn, my feet cut, and the perspiratibn streamed from my brow. 
To my guide, however, the ascent appeared to be neither toilsome 



GEORGE BORROW 4I 

nor difficult. The heat of the day for him *had no terrors, no 
moisture was wrung from his tanned countenance ; he drew not 
one short breath, and hopped upon the stones and rocks with all 
the provoking agility of a mountain goat. Before we had accom- 
plished one-half of the ascent, I felt myself quite exhausted. I 
reeled and staggered. " Cheer up, master mine, be of good cheer, 
and have no care," said the guide. " Yonder I see a wall of stones ; 
lie down beneath it in the shade." He put his long and strong 
arm round my waist, and though his stature compared with mine 
was that of a dwarf, he supported me, as if I had been a child, to 
a rude wall which seemed to traverse the greatest part of the hill, 
and served probably as a kind of boundary. It was difficult to 
find a shady spot : at last he perceived a small chasm, perhaps 
scooped by some shepherd as a couch in which to enjoy his siesta. 
In this he laid me gently down, and taking off his enormous ha.t, 
commenced fanning me with great assiduity. By degrees I re- 
vived, and after having rested for a considerable time, I again 
attempted the ascent, which, with the assistance of my guide, I at 
length accomplished. 

We were now standing at a great altitude between two bays : 
the wilderness of waters before us. Of all the ten thousand barks 
which annually plough those seas in sight of that old cape, not one 
was to be descried. It was a blue shiny waste, broken by no 
object save the black head of a spermaceti whale, which would 
occasionally show itself on the top, casting up thin jets of brine. 
The principal bay, that of Finisterra, as far as the entrance, was 
beautifully variegated by an immense shoal of sardinhas, on whose 
extreme skirts the monster was probably feasting. From the north- 
ern side of the cape we looked down upon a smaller bay, the shore 
of which was overhung by rocks of various and grotesque shapes ; 
this is called the outer bay, or, in the language of the country, 
Prai do tnar de fora : a fearful place in seasons of wind and tem- 
pests, when the long swell of the Atlantic pouring in, is broken 
into surf and foam by the sunken rocks with which it abounds. 
Even in the calmest day there is a rumbling and a hollow roar in 
that bay which fill the heart with uneasy sensations. 

On all sides there was grandeur and sublimity. After gazing 
from the summit of the cape for nearly an hour, we descended. 



42 WEE WILLIE WINKLE 

WEE WILLIE WINKIE 

RUDYARD KIPLING 

[From Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories, 1 888. The text is that of 
the unauthorized American edition.] 

" An officer and a gentleman." 

His full name was Percival William Williams, but he picked up 
the other name in a nursery-book, and that was the end of the 
christened titles. His mother's ayah called him \N'\\\\e-Balm, but 
as he never paid the faintest attention to anything that the ayah 
said, her wisdom did not help matters. 

His father was the colonel of the 195th, and as soon as Wee 
Willie Winkie was old enough to understand what military disci- 
pline meant. Colonel Williams put him under it. There was no 
other way of managing the child. When he was good for a week, 
he drew good-conduct pay ; and when he was bad, he was deprived 
of his good- conduct stripe. Generally he was bad, for India offers 
so many chances to little six-year-olds of going wrong. 

Children resent famiharity from strangers, and Wee Willie 
Winkie was a very particular child. Once he accepted an 
acquaintance, he was graciously pleased to thaw. He accepted 
Brandis, a subaltern of the 195th, on sight. Brandis was having 
tea at the colonel's, and Wee Willie Winkie entered, strong in the 
possession of a good-conduct badge won for not chasing the hens 
round the compound. He regarded Brandis with gravity for at 
least ten minutes, and then delivered himself of his opinion. 

" I hke you," said he, slowly, getting off his chair and coming 
over to Brandis. " I hke you. I shall call you Coppy, because 
of your hair. Do you mind being called Coppy ? it is because of 
ve hair, you know." 

He^e was one of the most embarrassing of Wee Willie Winkle's 
peculiarities. He would look at a stranger for some time, and 
then, without warning or explanation, would give him a name. 
And the name stuck. No regimental penalties could break Wee 
Willie Winkie of this habit. He lost his good-conduct badge for 
christening the commissioner's wife " Fobs " ; but nothing that the 



RUDVARD KIPLIMO 43 

colonel could do made the station forego the nickname, and Mrs. 
Collen remained Mrs. " Fobs " till the end of her stay. So Brandis 
was christened " Coppy," and rose, therefore, in the estimation of 
the regiment. 

If Wee Willie Winkie took an interest in any one, the fortunate 
man was envied alike by the mess and the rank and file. And in 
their envy lay no suspicion of self-interest. " The colonel's son " 
was idohzed on his own merits entirely. Yet Wee Willie Winkie 
was not lovely. His face was permanently freckled, as his legs 
were permanently scratched, and in spite of his mother's almost 
tearful remonstrances he had insisted upon having his long yellow 
locks cut short in the mihtary fashion. " I want my hair like 
Sergeant Tummil's," said Wee Willie Winkie, and his father 
abetting, the sacrifice was accomplished. 

Three weeks after the bestowal of his youthful affections on 
Lieutenant Brandis — henceforward to be called " Coppy " for 
the sake of brevity — Wee WiUie Winkie was destined to behold 
strange things and far beyond his comprehension. 

Coppy returned his liking with interest. Coppy had let him 
wear for five rapturous minutes his own big sword — just as tall as 
Wee Willie Winkie. Coppy had promised him a terrier puppy ; 
and Coppy had permitted him to witness the miraculous operation 
of shaving. Nay, more — Coppy had said that even he. Wee 
Willie Winkie, would rise in time to the ownership of a box of 
shiny knives, a silver soap-box, and a silver-handled " sputter- 
brush," as Wee Willie Winkie called it. Decidedly, there was 
no one except his father, who could give or take away good- 
conduct badges at pleasure, half so wise, strong, and valiant as 
Coppy with the Afghan and Egyptian medals on his breast. Why, 
then, should Coppy be guilty of the unmanly weakness of kissing 
— vehemently kissing — a " big girl," Miss Allardyce, to wit? In 
the course of a morning ride. Wee Willie Winkie had seen Coppy 
so doing, and, like the gentleman he was, had promptly wheeled 
round and cantered back to his groom, lest the groom should 
also see. 

Under ordinary circumstances he would have spoken to his 
father, but he felt instinctively that this was a matter on which 
Coppy ought first to be consulted. 



44 ^VEE WILLIE WINKIE 

" Coppy," shouted Wee Willie Winkie, reining up outside that 
subaltern's bungalow early one morning, " I want to see you, 
Coppy ! " 

" Come in, young 'un," returned Coppy, who was at early 
breakfast in the midst of his dogs. "What mischief have you 
been getting into now?" 

Wee Willie Winkie had done nothing notoriously bad for three 
days, and so stood on a pinnacle of virtue. 

" I've been doing nothing bad," said he, curling himself into a 
long chair with a studious affectation of the colonel's languor after 
a hot parade. He buried his freckled nose in a tea-cup and, with 
eyes staring roundly over the rim, asked : " I say, Coppy, is it 
pvvoper to kiss big girls? " 

" By Jove ! You're beginning early. Who do you want to 
kiss?" 

" No one. My muvver's always kissing me if I don't stop her. 
If it isn't pwoper, how was you kissing Major Allardyce's big girl 
last morning, by ve canal?" 

Coppy's brow wrinkled. He and Miss AUardyce had with great 
craft managed to keep their engagement secret for a fortnight. 
There were urgent and imperative reasons why Major AUardyce 
should not know how matters stood for at least another month, 
and this small marplot had discovered a great deal too much. 

" I saw you," said Wee Willie Winkie, calmly. " But ve groom 
didn't see. I said, ' Hiitjao.^ " 

" Oh, you had that much sense, you young rip," groaned poor 
Coppy, half amused and half angry. "And how many people 
may you have told about it? " 

" Only me myself. You didn't tell when I twied to wide ve 
buffalo ven my pony was lame ; and I fought you wouldn't like." 

" Winkie," said Coppy, enthusiastically, shaking the small hand, 
" you're the best of good fellows. Look here, you can't under- 
stand, all these things. One of these days — hang it, how can I 
make you see it ! — I'm going to marry Miss AUardyce, and then 
she'll be Mrs. Coppy, as you say. If your young mind is so scan- 
dahzed at the idea of kissing big girls, go and tell your father." 

"What will happen?" said Wee Willie Winkie, who firmly 
believed that his father was omnipotent. 



RUDYARD KIPLING 45 

" I shall get into trouble," said Coppy, playing his trump card 
with an appealing look at the holder of the ace. 

"Ven I won't," said Wee Wilhe Winkie, briefly. "But my 
faver says it's un-man-ly to be always kissing, and I didn't fink 
you'd do vat, Coppy." 

" I'm not always kissing, old chap. It's only now and then, and 
when you're bigger you'll do it, too. Your father meant it's not 
good for little boys." 

" Ah ! " said Wee Willie Winkie, now fully enlightened. " It's 
hke ve sputter-brush?" 

" Exactly," said Coppy, gravely. 

" But I don't fink I'll ever want to kiss big girls, nor no one, 
'cept my muvver. And I must vat, you know." 

There was a long pause, broken by Wee Willie Winkie. 

"Are you fond of vis big girl, Coppy?" 

" Awfully ! " said Coppy. 

" Fonder van you are of Bell or ve Butcha — or me ? " 

" It's in a different way," said Coppy. "You see, one of these 
days Miss AUardyce will belong to me, but you'll grow up and 
command the regiment and — all sorts of things. It's quite dif- 
ferent, you see." 

"Very well," said Wee Wilhe Winkie, rising. " If you're fond 
of ve big girl, I won't tell any one. I must go now." 

Coppy rose and escorted his small guest to the door, adding : 
" You're the best of httle fellows, Winkie. I tell you what. In 
thirty days from now you can tell if you like — tell any one you 
like." 

Thus the secret of the Brandis-Allardyce engagement was 
dependent on a little child's word. Coppy, who knew Wee 
Willie Winkle's idea of truth, was at ease, for he felt that he 
would not break promises. Wee Willie Winkie betrayed a special 
and unusual interest in Miss AUardyce, and, slowly revolving 
round that embarrassed young lady, was used to regard her 
gravely with unwinking eye. He was trying to discover why 
Coppy should have kissed her. She was not half so nice as his 
own mother. On the other hand, she was Coppy's property, and 
would in time belong to him. Therefore it behooved him to treat 
her with as much respect as Coppy's big sword or shiny pistol. 



46 WEE WILLIE WINKIE 

The idea that he shared a great secret in common with Coppy 
kept Wee Willie Winkie unusually virtuous for three weeks. Then 
the Old Adam broke out, and he made what he called a '' camp 
fire " at the bottom of the garden. How could he have foreseen 
that the flying sparks would have lighted the colonel's little hay- 
rick and consumed a week's store for the horses? Sudden and 
swift was the punishment — deprivation of the good-conduct 
badge and, most sorrowful of all, two days' confinement to bar- 
racks — the house and veranda — coupled with the withdrawal 
of the light of his father's countenance. 

He took the sentence like the man he strove to be, drew him- 
self up with a quivering under-lip, saluted, and, once clear of the 
room, ran to weep bitterly in his nursery — called by him " my 
quarters." Coppy came in the afternoon and attempted to con- 
sole the culprit. 

" I'm under awwest," said Wee Willie Winkie, mournfully, " and 
I didn't ought to speak to you." 

Very early the next morning he climbed on to the roof of the 
house — that was not forbidden — and beheld Miss AUardyce 
going for a ride. 

"Where are you going? " cried Wee Willie Winkie. 

"Across the river," she answered, and trotted forward. 

Now the cantonment in which the 195th lay was bounded on 
the north by a river — dry in the winter. From his earhest years. 
Wee Willie Winkie had been forbidden to go across the river, and 
had noted that even Coppy — the almost almighty Coppy — had 
never set foot beyond it. Wee Willie Winkie had once been read 
to, out of a big blue book, the history of the princess and the 
goblins — a most wonderful tale of a land where the goblins were 
always warring with the children of men until they were defeated 
by one Curdie. Ever since that date it seemed to him that the 
bare black and purple hills across the river were inhabited by 
goblins, and, in truth, every one had said that there lived the bad 
men. Even in his own house the lower halves of the windows 
were covered with green paper on account of the bad men who 
might, if allowed clear view, fire into peaceful drawing-rooms and 
comfortable bedrooms. Certainly, beyond the river, which was 
the end of all the earth, lived the bad men. And here was Major 



RUDYARD KIPLING 47 

Allardyce's big girl, Coppy's property, preparing to venture into 
their borders ! What would Coppy say if anything happened to 
her? If the goblins ran off with her as they did with Cardie's 
princess? She must at all hazards be turned back. 

The house was still. Wee WilUe Winkie reflected for a moment 
on the very terrible wrath of his father ; and then — broke his 
arrest ! It was a crime unspeakable. The low sun threw his 
shadow, very large and very black, on the trim garden-paths, as 
he went down to the stables and ordered his pony. It seemed to 
him in the hush of the dawn that all the big world had been 
bidden to stand still and look at Wee Willie Winkie guilty of 
mutiny. The drowsy groom handed him his mount, and, since 
the one great sin made all others insignificant. Wee Willie Winkie 
said that he was going to ride over to Coppy Sahib, and went out 
at a foot-pace, stepping on the soft mould of the flower-borders. 

The devastating track of the pony's feet was the last misdeed 
that cut him off from all sympathy of humanity. He turned into 
the road, leaned forward, and rode as fast as the pony could put 
foot to the ground in the direction of the river. 

But the liveliest of twelve-two ponies can do little against the 
long canter of a waler. Miss Allardyce was far ahead, had passed 
through the crops, beyond the police-post, when all the guards 
were asleep, and her mount was scattering the pebbles of the river- 
bed as Wee Willie Winkie left the cantonment and British India 
behind him. Bowed forward and still flogging. Wee Willie Winkie 
shot into Afghan territory, and could just see Miss Allardyce, a 
black speck, flickering across the stony plain. The reason of her 
wandering was simple enough. Coppy, in a tone of too hastily 
assumed authority, had told her over night that she must not ride 
out by the river. And she had gone to prove her own spirit and 
teach Coppy a lesson. 

Almost at the foot of the inhospitable hills. Wee Willie Winkie 
saw the waler blunder and come down heavily. Miss Allardyce 
struggled clear, but her ankle had been severely twisted, and she 
could not stand. Having thus demonstrated her spirit, she wept 
copiously, and was surprised by the apparition of a white, wide- 
eyed child in khaki, on a nearly spent pony. 

" Are you badly, badly hurted ? " shouted Wee Wjllie Winkie, 



48 WEE WILLIE WINKIE 

as soon as he was within range. " You didn't ought to be 
here." 

"I don't know," said Miss Allardyce, ruefully, ignoring the 
reproof. " Good gracious, child, what are you doing here ? " 

"You said you was going acwoss ve wiver," panted Wee Willie 
Winkie, throwing himself off his pony. " And nobody — not even 
Coppy — must go acwoss ve wiver, and I came after you ever so 
hard, but you wouldn't stop, and now you've hurted yourself, and 
Coppy will be angwy wiv me, and — I've bwoken my awwest ! 
I've bwoken my awwest ! " 

The future colonel of the 195th sat down and sobbed. In spite 
of the pain in her ankle the girl was moved. 

" Have you ridden all the way from cantonments, little man ? 
What for ? " 

"You belonged to Coppy. Coppy told me so!" wailed Wee 
Willie Winkie, disconsolately. " I saw him kissing you, and he 
said he was fonder of you van Bell or ve Butcha or me. And so 
I came. You must get up and come back. You didn't ought to 
be here. Vis is a bad place, and I've bwoken my awwest." 

"I can't move, Winkie," said Miss Allardyce, with a groan. 
" I've hurt my foot. What shall I do ? " 

She showed a readiness to weep afresh, which steadied Wee 
WiUie Winkie, who had been brought up to believe that tears were 
the depth of unmanliness. Still, when one is as great a sinner as 
Wee Willie Winkie, even a man may be permitted to break down. 

"Winkie," said Miss Allardyce, "when you've rested a little, 
ride back and tell them to send out something, to carry me back 
in. It hurts fearfully." 

The child sat still for a little time and Miss Allardyce closed her 
eyes; the pain was nearly making her faint. She was roused by 
Wee Willie Winkie tying up the reins on his pony's neck and set- 
ting it free with a vicious cut of his whip that made it whicker. 
The liyle animal headed toward the cantonments. 

" Oh, Winkie ! What are you doing ? " 

" Hush ! " said Wee Willie Winkie. " Vere's a man coming — 
one of ve bad men. I must stay wiv you. My faver says a man 
must always look after a girl. Jack will go home, and ven vey'U 
come and look for us. Vat's why I let him go." 



RUDYARD KIPLING 



49 



Not one man but two or three had appeared from behind the 
rocks of the hills, and the heart of Wee Willie Winkie sunk within 
him, for just in this manner were the goblins wont to steal out and 
vex Curdie's soul. Thus had they played in Curdie's garden, he 
had seen the picture, and thus had they frightened the princess's 
nurse. He heard them talking to each other, and recognized 
with joy the bastard Pushto, that he had picked up from one of his 
father's grooms lately dismissed. People who spoke that tongue 
could not be the bad men. They were only natives after all. 

They came up to the boulders on which Miss Allardyce's horse 
had blundered. 

Then rose from the rock Wee Willie Winkie, child of the domi- 
nant race, aged six and three-quarters, and said, briefly and 
emphatically, ^^ Jao ! " The pony had crossed the river-bed. 

The men laughed, and laughter from the natives was the one 
thing Wee Willie Winkie could not tolerate. He asked them 
what they wanted and why they did not depart. Other men, with 
most evil faces and crooked-stocked guns, crept out of the shadows 
of the hills, till soon Wee Willie Winkie was face to face with an 
audience some twenty strong. Miss Allardyce screamed. 

" Who are you ? " said one of the men. 

" I am the Colonel Sahib's son, and my order is that you go at 
once. You black men are frightening the Miss Sahib. One of 
you must run into cantonments and take the news that the Miss 
Sahib has hurt herself, and that the colonel's son is here with her." 

" Put our feet into the trap ? " was the laughing reply. " Hear 
this boy's speech ! " 

" Say that I sent you — I, the colonel's son. They will give you 
money." 

" What is the use of this talk? Take up the child and the girl, 
and we can at least ask for the ransom. Ours are the villages on 
the heights," said a voice in the background. 

These luere the bad men — worse than the goblins — and it 
needed all Wee Willie Winkle's training to prevent him from 
bursting into tears. But he felt that to cry before a native, 
excepting only his mother's ayah, would be an infamy greater 
than any mutiny. Moreover, he, as future colonel of the 195 th, 
had that grim regiment at his back. 



50 WEE WILLIE WINK IE 

"Are you going to carry us away?" said Wee Willie Winkie, 
very blanched and uncomfortable. 

" Yes, my little Sahib Bahadur,'' said the tallest of the men, 
*'and eat you afterward." 

"That is child's talk," said Wee Willie Winkie. "Men do not 
eat men." 

A yell of laughter interrupted him, but he went on, firmly : 
"And if you do carry us away, 1 tell you that all my regiment will 
come up in a day and kill you all, without leaving one. Who will 
take my message to the Colonel Sahib? " 

Speech in any vernacular — and Wee Willie Winkie had a col- 
loquial acquaintance with three — was easy to the boy who could 
not yet manage his " r's " and " th's " aright. 

Another man joined the conference, crying : " Oh, fooHsh men ! 
What this babe says is true. He is the heart's heart of those 
white troops. For the sake of peace let them go both, for if he 
be taken, the regiment will break loose and gut the valley. Our 
villages are in the valley, and we shall not escape. That regi- 
ment are devils. They broke Khoda Yar's breast-bone with kicks 
when he tried to take the rifles ; and if we touch this child, they 
will fire and rape and plunder for a month, till nothing remains. 
Better to send a man back to take the message and get a reward. 
I say that this child is their god, and that they will spare none of 
us, nor our women, if we harm him." 

It was Din Mahommed, the dismissed groom of the colonel, 
who made the diversion, and an angry and heated discussion 
followed. Wee Willie Winkie, standing over Miss Allardyce, 
waited the upshot. Surely his " wegiment," his own " wegiment," 
would not desert him if they knew of his extremity. 



The riderless pony brought the news to the 195th, though there 
had been consternation in the colonel's household for an hour 
before. The little beast came in through the parade-ground in 
front of the main barracks, where the men were setding down 
to play spoil-five till the afternoon. Devlin, the color-sergeant of 
E Company, glanced at the empty saddle and tumbled through 
the barrack-rooms, kicking up each room corporal as he passed. 



RUDYARD KIPLING 5 1 

" Up, ye beggars ! There's something happened to the colonel's 
son," he shouted. 

'*' He couldn't fall off! S'elp me, 'e couldn't fall off," blubbered 
a drummer-boy. " Go an' hunt acrost the river. He's over there 
if he's anywhere, an' maybe those Pathans have got 'im. For the 
love o' Gawd don't look for 'im in the nullahs ! Let's go over 
the river." 

" There's sense in Mott yet," said Devlin. " E Company, double 
out to the river — sharp ! " 

So E Company, in its shirt-sleeves mainly, doubled for the dear 
life, and in the rear toiled the perspiring sergeant, adjuring it to 
double yet faster. The cantonment was alive with the men of the 
195th hunting for Wee Willie Winkie, and the colonel finally over- 
took E Company, far too exhausted to swear, struggling in the 
pebbles of the river-bed. 

Up the hill under which Wee Willie Winkle's bad men were 
discussing the wisdom of carrying off the child and the girl, 
a lookout fired two shots. 

" What have I said ? " shouted Din Mahommed. " There is the 
warning ! The pulton are out already and are coming across the 
plain ! Get away ! Let us not be seen with the boy ! " 

The men waited for an instant, and then, as another shot was 
fired, withdrew into the hills, silently as they had appeared. 

" The wegiment is coming," said Wee Willie Winkie, confidently 
to Miss Allardyce, " and it's all wight. Don't cwy ! " 

He needed the advice himself, for ten minutes later, when his 
father came up, he was weeping bitterly with his head in Miss 
Allardyce's lap. 

And the men of the 195th carried him home with shouts and 
rejoicings ; and Coppy, who had ridden a horse into a lather, 
met him, and, to his intense disgust, kissed him openly in the 
presence of the men. 

But there was balm for his dignity. His father assured him that 
not only would the breaking of arrest be condoned, but that the 
good-conduct badge would be restored as soon as his mother 
could sew it on his blouse-sleeve. Miss Allardyce had told the 
colonel a story that made him proud of his son. 

" She belonged to you, Coppy," said Wee Willie Winnie, indi- 



52 THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 

eating Miss AUardyce with a grimy forefinger. " I knew she didn't 

ought to go acwoss ve wiver, and I knew ve wegiment would come 

to me if I sent Jack home." 

"You're a hero, Winkie," said Coppy, " 2^. pukka hero ! " 

" I don't know what vat means," said Wee WilUe Winkie, "but 

you mustn't call me Winkie any no more. I'm Percival Will'am 

Will'ams." 

And in this manner did Wee Willie Winkie enter into his 

manhood. 

THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 

EDGAR ALLAN POE 

[First published in 1846. The text is that of Griswold's edition of his 
Works, 1850.] 

The thousand injuries of Fortunate I had borne as I best could ; 
but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so 
well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that 
I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged ; this 
was a point definitively settled — but the very definitiveness with 
which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only 
punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when 
retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when 
the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done 
the wrong. 

It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I 
given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued, as 
was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that 
my smile now was at the thought of his immolation. 

He had a weak point — this Fortunato — although in other 
regards he was a man to be respected and even feared. He 
prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have 
the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is 
adopted to suit the time and opportunity — to practise imposture 
upon the British and Austrian 7nillionnaires. In painting and 
gemmary Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack — but in the 
matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 53 

differ from him materially : I was skilful in the Italian vintages 
myself, and bought largely whenever I could. 

It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness 
of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He accosted 
me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The 
man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, 
and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I 
was so pleased to see him that I thought I should never have 
done wringing his hand. 

I said to him — " My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. 
How remarkably well you are looking to-day ! But I have re- 
ceived a pipe of what passes for Amontillado, and I have my 
doubts." 

" How ? " said he. " Amontillado ? A pipe ? Impossible ! And 
in the middle of the carnival ? " 

"I have my doubts," I replied; "and I was silly enough to 
pay the full Amontillado price without consulting you in the 
matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful of losing a 
bargain." 

" Amontillado ! " 

" I have my doubts." 

" Amontillado ! " 

" And I must satisfy them." 

"Amontillado!" 

"As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchesi. If any 
one has a critical turn, it is he. He will tell me — " 

" Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry." 

" And yet some fools will have it that his taste is a match for 
your own." 

" Come, let us go." 

"Whither ?" 

" To your vaults." 

" My friend, no ; I will not impose upon your good nature. I 
perceive you have an engagement. Luchesi — " 

" I have no engagement ; — come." 

" My friend, no. It is not the engagement, but the severe cold 
with which I perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably 
damp. They are encrusted with nitre." 



54 THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 

" Let us go, nevertheless. The cold is merely nothing. Amon- 
tillado ! You have been imposed upon. And as for Luchesi, he 
cannot distinguish Sherry from Amontillado." 

Thus speaking, Fortunato possessed himself of my arm. Putting 
on a mask of black silk, and drawing a roquelaire closely about 
my person, I suffered him to hurry me to my palazzo. 

There were no attendants at home ; they had absconded to 
make merry in honor of the time. I had told them that I should 
not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders 
not to stir from the house. These orders were sufficient, I well 
knew, to insure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as 
soon as my back was turned. 

I took from their sconces two flambeaux, and giving one to 
Fortunato, bowed him through several suites of rooms to the arch- 
way that led into the vaults. I passed down a long and winding 
staircase, requesting him to be cautious as he followed. We came 
at length to the foot of the descent, and stood together on the 
damp ground of the catacombs of the Montresors. 

The gait of my friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his cap 
jingled as he strode. 

" The pipe," he said. 

" It is farther on," said I ; " but observe the white web-work 
which gleams from these cavern walls." 

He turned towards me, and looked into my eyes with two filmy 
orbs that distilled the rheum of intoxication. 

" Nitre ? " he asked, at lertgth. 

" Nitre," I replied. " How long have you had that cough? " 

" Ugh ! ugh ! ugh ! — ugh ! ugh ! ugh ! — ugh ! ugh ! ugh ! — 
ugh ! ugh ! ugh ! — ugh ! ugh ! ugh ! " 

My poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes. 

" It is nothing," he said, at last. 

"Come," I said, with decision, "we will go back; your health 
is precious. You are rich, respected, admired, beloved ; you are 
happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed. For me it 
is no matter. We will go back ; you will be ill, and I cannot be 
responsible. Besides, there is Luchesi — " 

" Enough," he said ; " the cough is a mere nothing ; it will not 
kill me. I shall not die of a cough." 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 55 

" True — true," I replied ; " and, indeed, I had no intention of 
alarming you unnecessarily — but you should use all proper cau- 
tion. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps." 

Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a 
long row of its fellows that lay upon the mould. 

" Drink," I said, presenting him the wine. 

He raised it to his lips with a leer. He paused and nodded to 
me familiarly, while his bells jingled. 

" I drink," he said, " to the buried that repose around us." 

" And I to your long Hfe." 

He again took my arm, and we proceeded. 

" These vaults," he said, " are extensive." 

"TheMontresors," I replied, "were a great and numerous family." 

" I forgot your arms." 

" A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure ; the foot crushes a 
serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel." 

"And the motto?" 

" Nemo f/ie inipune lacessit." ^ 

" Good ! " he said. 

The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own 
fancy grew warm with the Medoc. We had passed through walls 
of piled bones, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the 
inmost recesses of the catacombs. I paused again, and this time 
I made bold to seize Fortunato by an arm above the elbow. 

" The nitre ! " I said ; " see, it increases. It hangs like moss 
upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops of 
moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back ere it 
is too late. Your cough — " 

"It is nothing," he said; "let us go on. But first, another 
draught of the Medoc." 

I broke and reached him a flagon of De Grave. He emptied 
it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed 
and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation 1 did not under- 
stand. 

I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement — a 
grotesque one. 

" You do not comprehend ? " he said. 

1 [No one attacks me with impunity.] 



56 THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 

" Not I," I replied. 

" Then you are not of the brotherhood." 

"How ?" 

" You are not of the masons." 

" Yes, yes," I said, " yes, yes." 

" You ? Impossible ! A mason ? " 

"A mason," I repUed. 

" A sign," he said. 

" It is this," I answered, producing a trowel from beneath the 
folds of my roquelaire. 

"You jest," he exclaimed, recoiling a few spaces. "But let us 
proceed to the Amontillado." 

" Be it so," I said, replacing the tool beneath the cloak, and 
again offering him my arm. He leaned upon it heavily. We 
continued our route in search of the Amontillado. We passed 
through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and 
descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness 
of the air caused our flambeaux rather to glow than flame. 

At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another 
less spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled 
to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of 
Paris. Three sides of this interior crypt were still ornamented in 
this manner. From the fourth the bones had been thrown down, 
and lay promiscuously upon the earth, forming at one point a 
mound of some size. Within the wall thus exposed by the dis- 
placing of the bones, we perceived a still interior recess, in depth 
about four feet, in width three, in height six or seven. It seemed 
to have been constructed for no especial use within itself, but 
formed merely the interval between two of the colossal supports 
of the roof of the catacombs, and was backed by one of their 
circumscribing walls of solid granite. 

It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeav- 
ored to pry into the depths of the recess. Its termination the 
feeble light did not enable us to see. 

" Proceed," I said ; " herein is the Amontillado. As for 
Luchesi — " 

" He is an ignoramus," interrupted my friend, as he stepped 
unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels. In 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 57 

an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding 
his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A 
moment more and I had fettered him to the granite. In its sur- 
face were two iron staples, distant from each other about two feet, 
horizontally. From one of these depended a short chain, from 
the other a padlock. Throwing the links about his waist, it was 
but the work of a few seconds to secure it. He was too much 
astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key, I stepped back from 
the recess. 

"Pass your hand," I said, "over the wall; you cannot help 
feeling the nitre. Indeed it is very damp. Once more let me 
implore you to return. No ? Then I must positively leave you. 
But I must first render you all the little attentions in my power." 

" The Amontillado ! " ejaculated my friend, not yet recovered 
from his astonishment. 

"True," I rephed ; " the Amontillado." 

As I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones 
of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon 
uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these 
materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to 
wall up the entrance of the niche. 

I had scarcely laid the first tier of the masonry when I dis- 
covered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure 
worn off. The earliest indication I had of this was a low moan- 
ing cry from the depth of the recess. It was not the cry of a 
drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I 
laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth ; and then I 
heard the furious vibrations of the chain. The noise lasted for 
several minutes, during which, that I might hearken to it with the 
more satisfaction, I ceased my labors and sat down upon the 
bones. When at last the clanking subsided, I resumed the trowel, 
and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the 
seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon a level with my 
breast. I again paused, and holding the flambeaux over the mason- 
work, threw a few feeble rays upon the figure within. 

A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from 
the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently 
back. For a brief moment I hesitated — I trembled. Unsheath- 



58 THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 

ing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess : but the 
thought of an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the 
solid fabric of the catacombs, and felt satisfied. I reapproached 
the wall. I replied to the yells of him who clamored. I re- 
echoed — I aided — I surpassed them in volume and in strength. 
I did this, and the clamorer grew still. 

It was now midnight, and my task was drawing to a close. I 
had completed the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth tier. I had 
finished a portion of the last and the eleventh ; there remained 
but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in, I struggled with 
its weight ; I placed it partially in its destined position. But now 
there came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs 
upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which I had 
difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato. The 
voice said — 

" Ha ! ha ! ha ! — he ! he ! — a very good joke indeed — an 
excellent jest. We will have many a rich laugh about it at the 
palazzo — he ! he ! he ! — over our wine — he ! he ! he ! " 

" The Amontillado ! " I said. 

" He ! he ! he ! — he ! he ! he ! — yes, the Amontillado. But 
is it not getting late ? Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo, 
the Lady Fortunato and the rest ? Let us be gone." 

" Yes," I said, " let us be gone." 

"For the love of God, Mojitresor ! " 

« Yes," I said, " for the love of God ! " 

But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew 
impatient. I called aloud — 

" Fortunato ! " 

No answer. I called again — 

" Fortunato ! " 

No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aper- 
ture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a 
jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick — on account of the 
dampndss of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end of my 
labor. I forced the last stone into its position ; I plastered it up. 
Against the new masonry I reerected the old rampart of bones. 
For the half of a century no mortal hasdisturbed them. In pace 
requiescat I 




NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 59 



ETHAN BRAND 

A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMAN 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

[First published in 1851. The text is that of the Snoiv Image and Other 
Twice- Told Tales, 1852.] 

Bartram the lime-burner, a rough, heavy-looking man, be- 
grimed with charcoal, sat watching his kiln, at nightfall, while 
his little son played at building houses with the scattered frag- 
ments of marble, when, on the hillside below them, they heard a 
roar of laughter, not mirthful, but slow, and even solemn, like a 
wind shaking the boughs of the forest. 

" Father, what is that ? " asked the little boy, leaving his play, 
and pressing betwixt his father's knees. 

" O, some drunken man, I suppose," answered the lime- 
burner ; " some merry fellow from the bar-room in the village, 
who dared not laugh loud enough within doors, lest he should 
blow the roof of the house off. So here he is, shaking his jolly 
sides at the foot of Graylock." 

" But, father," said the child, more sensitive than the obtuse, 
middle-aged clown, " he does not laugh like a man that is glad. 
So the noise frightens me ! " 

" Don't be a fool, child ! " cried his father, gruffly. " You 
will never make a man, I do believe ; there is too much of your 
mother in you. I have known the rustling of a leaf startle you. 
Hark ! Here comes the merry fellow now. You shall see that 
there is no harm in him." 

Bartram and his little son, while they were talking thus, sat 
watching the same lime-kiln that had been the scene of Ethan 
Brand's solitary and meditative life, before he began his search 
for the Unpardonable Sin. Many years, as we have seen, had 
now elapsed, since that portentous night when the Idea was first 
developed. The kiln, however, on the mountain-side, stood un- 
impaired, and was in nothing changed since he had thrown his 
dark thoughts into the intense glow of its furnace, and melted 



60 ETHAN BRAND 

them, as it were, into the one thought that took possession of his 
life. It was a rude, round, towerUke structure, about twenty 
feet high, heavily built of rough stones, and with a hillock of 
earth heaped about the larger part of its circumference ; so that 
the blocks and fragments of marble might be drawn by cart- 
loads, and thrown in at the top. There was an opening at the 
bottom of the tower like an oven-mouth, but large enough to ad- 
mit a man in a stooping posture, and provided with a massive 
iron door. With the smoke and jets of flame issuing from the 
chinks and crevices of this door, which seemed to give admit- 
tance into the hillside, it resembled nothing so much as the pri- 
vate entrance to the infernal regions, which the shepherds of the 
Delectable Mountains were accustomed to show to pilgrims. 

There are many such lime-kilns in that tract of country, for 
the purpose of burning the white marble which composes a large 
part of the substance of the hills. Some of them, built years 
ago, and long deserted, with weeds growing in the vacant round 
of the interior, which is open to the sky, and grass and wild- 
flowers rooting themselves into the chinks of the stones, look 
already like relics of antiquity, and may yet be overspread with 
the lichens of centuries to come. Others, where the lime-burner 
still feeds his daily and night-long fire, afford points of interest 
to the wanderer among the hills, who seats himself on a log of 
wood or a fragment of marble, to hold a chat with the solitary 
man. It is a lonesome, and, when the character is inclined to 
thought, may be an intensely thoughtful occupation ; as it proved 
in the case of Ethan Brand, who had mused to such strange pur- 
pose, in days gone by, while the fire in this very kiln was burning. 

The man who now watched the fire was of a different order, 
and troubled himself with no thoughts save the very few that 
were requisite to his business. At frequent intervals, he flung 
back the clashing weight of the iron door, and, turning his face 
from the insufferable glare, thrust in huge logs of oak, or stirred 
the immense brands with a long pole. Within the furnace were 
seen the curhng and riotous flames, and the burning marble, 
almost molten with the intensity of heat ; while without, the 
reflection of the fire quivered on the dark intricacy of the sur- 
rounding forest, and showed in the foreground a bright and 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 6 1 

ruddy little picture of the hut, the spring beside its door, the 
athletic and coal-begrimed figure of the lime-burner, and the 
half-frightened child, shrinking into the protection of his father's 
shadow. And when again the iron door was closed, then reap- 
peared the tender light of the half-full moon, which vainly strove 
to trace out the indistinct shapes of the neighboring mountains ; 
and, in the upper sky, there was a flitting congregation of clouds, 
still faintly tinged with the rosy sunset, though thus far down 
into the valley the sunshine had vanished long and long ago. 

The little boy now crept still closer to his father, as footsteps 
were heard ascending the hillside, and a human form thrust aside 
the bushes that clustered beneath the trees. 

"Halloo! who is it?" cried the lime-burner, vexed at his 
son's timidity, yet half infected by it. " Come forward, and 
show yourself, like a man, or I'll fling this chunk of marble at 
your head ! " 

" You offer me a rough welcome," said a gloomy voice, as the 
unknown man drew nigh. " Yet I neither claim nor desire a 
kinder one, even at my own fireside." 

To obtain a distincter view, Bartram threw open the iron 
door of the kfln, whence immediately issued a gush of fierce 
light, that smote full upon the stranger's face and figure. To a 
careless eye there appeared nothing very remarkable in his as- 
pect, which was that of a man in a coarse, brown, country-made 
suit of clothes, tall and thin, with the staff and heavy shoes of a 
wayfarer. As he advanced, he fixed his eyes — which were 
very bright — intently upon the brightness of the furnace, as if 
he beheld, or expected to behold, some object worthy of note 
within it. 

" Good evening, stranger," said the lime-burner ; " whence 
come you, so late in the day ? " 

" I come from my search," answered the wayfarer; "for, at 
last, it is finished." 

"Drunk! — or crazy!" muttered Bartram to himself. "I 
shall have trouble with the fellow. The sooner I drive him 
away, the better." 

The little boy, all in a tremble, whispered to his father, and 
begged him to shut the door of the kiln, so that there might not 



62 ETHAN BRAND 

be so much light ; for that there was something in the man's 
face which he was afraid to look at, yet could not look away 
from. And, indeed, even the lime-burner's dull and torpid 
sense began to be impressed by an indescribable something in 
that thin, rugged, thoughtful visage, with the grizzled hair hang- 
ing wildly about it, and those deeply-sunken eyes, which gleamed 
like fires within the entrance of a mysterious cavern. But, as 
he closed the door, the stranger turned towards him, and spoke 
in a quiet, familiar way, that made Bartram feel as if he were a 
sane and sensible man, after all. 

" Your task draws to an end, I see," said he. " This marble 
has already been burning three days. A few hours more will 
convert the stone to lime." 

"Why, who are you?" exclaimed the lime-burner. "You 
seem as well acquainted with my business as I am myself." 

"And well I may be," said the stranger ; " for I followed the 
same craft many a long year, and here, too, on this very spot. 
But you are a newcomer in these parts. Did you never hear 
of Ethan Brand ? " 

" The man that went in search of the Unpardonable Sin ? " 
asked Bartram, with a laugh. 

" The same," answered the stranger. " He has found what 
he sought, and therefore he comes back again." 

" What ! then you are Ethan Brand himself? " cried the lime- 
burner, in amazement. " I am a newcomer here, as you say, 
and they call it eighteen years since you left the foot of Gray- 
lock. But, I can tell you, the good folks still talk about Ethan 
Brand, in the village yonder, and what a strange errand took him 
away from his lime-kiln. Well, and so you have found the Un- 
pardonable Sin ? " 

" Even so ! " said the stranger, calmly. 

" If the question is a fair one," proceeded Bartram, " where 
might 'it be ? " 

Ethan Brand laid his finger on his own heart. 

" Here ! " replied he. 

And then, without mirth in his countenance, but as if moved 
by an involuntary recognition of the infinite absurdity of seek- 
ing throughout the world for what was the closest of all things 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 63 

to himself, and looking into every heart, save his own, for what 
was hidden in no other breast, he broke into a laugh of scorn. It 
was the same slow, heavy laugh that had almost appalled the 
lime-burner when it heralded the wayfarer's approach. 

The solitary mountain-side was made dismal by it. Laughter, 
when out of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered 
state of feeling, may be the most terrible modulation of the 
human voice. The laughter of one asleep, even if it be a little 
child, — the madman's laugh — the wild, screaming laugh of a 
born idiot, — are sounds that we sometimes tremble to hear, and 
would always willingly forget. Poets have imagined no utter- 
ance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh. 
And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this 
strange man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into 
laughter that rolled away into the night, and was indistinctly 
reverberated among the hills. 

" Joe," said he to his little son, " scamper down to the tavern 
in the village, and tell the jolly fellows there that Ethan Brand 
has come back, and that he has found the Unpardonable Sini " 

The boy darted away on his errand, to which Ethan Brand 
made no objection, nor seemed hardly to notice it. He sat on a 
log of wood looking steadfastly at the iron door of the kiln. 
When the child was out of sight, and his swift and light foot- 
steps ceased to be heard treading first on the fallen leaves and 
then on the rocky mountain-path, the lime-burner began to re- 
gret his departure. He felt that the little fellow's presence had 
been a barrier between his guest and himself, and that he must 
now deal, heart to heart, with a man who, on his own confes- 
sion, had committed the one only crime for which Heaven could 
afford no mercy. That crime, in its indistinct blackness, seemed 
to overshadow him. The lime-burner's own sins rose up within 
him, and made his memory riotous with a throng of evil shapes 
that asserted their kindred with the Master Sin, whatever it 
might be, which it was within the scope of man's corrupted na- 
ture to conceive and cherish. They were all of one family ; they 
went to and fro between his breast and Ethan Brand's, and car- 
ried dark greetings from one to the other. 

Then Bartram remembered the stories which had grown tra- 



64 ETHAN BRAND 

ditionary in reference to this strange man, who had come upon 
him like a shadow of the night, and was making himself at home 
in his old place, after so long absence that the dead people, 
dead and buried for years, would have had more right to be at 
home, in any familiar spot, than he. Ethan Brand, it was said, 
had conversed with Satan himself in the lurid blaze of this very 
kiln. The legend had been matter of mirth heretofore, but 
looked grisly now. According to this tale, before Ethan Brand 
departed on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a 
fiend from the hot furnace of the lime-kiln, night after night, in 
order to confer with him about the Unpardonable Sin ; the man 
and the fiend each laboring to frame the image of some mode of 
guilt which could neither be atoned for nor forgiven. And, with 
the first gleam of light upon the mountain-top, the fiend crept 
in at the iron door, there to abide the intensest element of fire, 
until again summoned forth to share in the dreadful task of ex- 
tending man's possible guilt beyond the scope of Heaven's else 
infinite mercy. 

While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these 
thoughts, Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the 
door of the kiln. The action was in such accordance with the 
idea in Bartram's mind, that he almost expected to see the Evil 
One issue forth, red-hot from the raging furnace. 

" Hold ! hold ! " cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh ; 
for he was ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered 
him. " Don't, for mercy's sake, bring out your devil now ! " 

" Man ! " sternly replied Ethan Brand, " what need have I of 
the devil ? I have left him behind me, on my track. It is with 
such half-way sinners as you that he busies himself. Fear not, 
because I open the door. I do but act by old custom, and am 
going to trim your fire, like a lime-burner, as I was once." 

He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent for- 
ward to gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless 
of the fierce glow that reddened upon his face. The lime- 
burner sat watching him, and half suspected his strange guest 
of a purpose, if not to evoke a fiend, at least to plunge bodily 
into the flames, and thus vanish from the sight of man. Ethan 
Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the door of the kiln. 



NATHANIEL NAWTHORNE 65 

" I have looked," said he, " into many a human heart that 
was seven times hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace 
is with fire. But I found not there what I sought. No, not the 
Unpardonable Sin ! " 

" What is the Unpardonable Sin ? " asked the lime-burner ; 
and then he shrank further from his companion, trembling lest 
his question should be answered. 

" It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan 
Brand, standing erect, with a pride that distinguishes all enthu- 
siasts of his stamp. " A sin that grew nowhere else ! The sin 
of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood 
with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to 
its own mighty claims ! The only sin that deserves a recom- 
pense of immortal agony ! Freely, were it to do again, would I 
incur the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the retribution ! " 

" The man's head is turned," muttered the lime-burner to him- 
self. " He may be a sinner, like the rest of us, — nothing more 
likely, — but, I'll be sworn, he is a madman too." 

Nevertheless he felt uncomfortable at his situation, alone with 
Ethan Brand on the wild mountain-side, and was right glad to 
hear the rough murmur of tongues, and the footsteps of what 
seemed a pretty numerous party, stumbling over the stones and 
rustling through the underbrush. Soon appeared the whole lazy 
regiment that was wont to infest the village tavern, comprehend- 
ing three or four individuals who had drunk flip beside the bar- 
room fire through all the winters, and smoked their pipes beneath 
the stoop through all the summers, since Ethan Brand's depar- 
ture. Laughing boisterously, and mingling all their voices to- 
gether in unceremonious talk, they now burst into the moonshine 
and narrow streaks of firelight that illuminated the open space 
before the lime-kiln. Bartram set the door ajar again, flooding 
the spot with light, that the whole company might get a fair view 
of Ethan Brand, and he of them. 

There, among other old acquaintances, was a once ubiquitous 
man, now almost extinct, but whom we were formerly sure to 
encounter at the hotel of every thriving village throughout the 
country. It was the stage-agent. The present specimen of the 
genus was a wilted and smoke-dried man, wrinkled and red- 



66 ETHAN BRAND 

nosed, in a smartly-cut, brown, bob-tailed coat, with brass buttons, 
who, for a length of time unknown, had kept his desk and corner 
in the bar-room, and was still puffing what seemed to be the same 
cigar that he had lighted twenty years before. He had great 
fame as a dry joker, though, perhaps, less on account of any 
intrinsic humor than from a certain flavor of brandy-toddy and 
tobacco-smoke, which impregnated all his ideas and expressions, 
as well as his person. Another well-remembered though strangely- 
altered face was that of Lawyer Giles, as people still called him 
in courtesy ; an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled shirt-sleeves and 
tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an attorney, in 
what he called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and in great 
vogue among the village litigants ; but flip, and sling, and toddy, 
and cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night, 
had caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds and • 
degrees of bodily labor, till at last, to adopt his own phrase, he 
slid into a soap-vat. In other words, Giles was now a soap- 
boiler, in a small way. He had come to be but the fragment of 
a human being, a part of one foot having been chopped off by 
an axe, and an entire hand torn away by the devilish grip of a 
steam-engine. Yet though the corporeal hand was gone, a spir- 
itual member remained ; for, stretching forth the stump, Giles 
steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers 
with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were amputated. 
A maimed and miserable wretch he was ; but one, nevertheless, 
whom the world could not trample on, and had no right to scorn, 
either in this or any previous stage of his misfortunes, since he 
had still kept up the courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing 
in charity, and with his one hand — and that the left one — 
fought a stern battle against want and hostile circumstances. 

Among the throng, too, came another personage, who, with 
certain points of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of 
difference. It was the village doctor ; a man of some fifty years, 
whom, at an earlier period of his life, we introduced as paying a 
professional visit to Ethan Brand during the latter's supposed 
insanity. He was now a purple-visaged, rude, and brutal, yet 
half-gentlemanly figure, with something wild, ruined, and des- 
perate in his talk, and in all the details of his gesture and man- 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 6/ 

ners. Brandy possessed this man like an evil spirit, and made 
him as surly and savage as a wild beast, and as miserable as a 
lost soul ; but there was supposed to be in him such wonderful 
skill, such native gifts of healing, beyond any which medical 
science could impart, that society caught hold of him, and would 
not let him sink out of its reach. So, swaying to and fro upon 
his horse, and grumbling thick accents at the bedside, he visited 
all the sick chambers for miles about among the mountain towns, 
and sometimes raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or 
quite as often, no doubt, sent his patient to a grave that was dug 
many a year too soon. The doctor -had an everlasting pipe 
in his mouth, and as somebody said, in allusion to his habit of 
swearing, it was always alight with hell-fire. 

These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan 
Brand each after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to par- 
take of the contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they 
averred, he would find something far better worth seeking for 
than the Unpardonable Sin. No mind, which has wrought itself 
by intense and solitary meditation into a high state of enthusiasm, 
can endure the kind of contact with low and vulgar modes of 
thought and feeling to which Ethan Brand was now subjected. 
It made him doubt — and, strange to say, it was a painful doubt 
— whether he had indeed found^ the Unpardonable Sin, and 
found it within himself. The whole question on which he had 
exhausted life, and more than life, looked like a delusion. 

"Leave me," he said bitterly, "ye brute beasts, that have 
made yourselves so, shrivelling up your souls with fiery liquors ! 
I have done with you. Years and years ago, I groped into your 
hearts, and found nothing there for my purpose. Get ye gone ! " 

"Why, you uncivil scoundrel," cried the fierce doctor, "is 
that the way you respond to the kindness of your best friends ? 
Then let me tell you the truth. You have no more found the 
Unpardonable Sin than yonder boy Joe has. You are but a 
crazy fellow, — I told you so twenty years ago, — neither better 
nor worse than a crazy fellow, and the fit companion of old 
Humphrey, here ! " 

He pointed to an old man, shabbily dressed, with long white 
hair, thin visage, and unsteady eyes. For some years past this 



68 ETHAN BRAND 

aged person had been wandering about among the hills, inquir- 
ing of all travellers whom he met for his daughter. The girl, it 
seemed, had gone off with a company of circus-performers ; and 
occasionally tidings of her came to the village, and fine stories 
were told of her glittering appearance as she rode on horseback 
in the ring, or performed marvellous feats on the tight-rope. 

The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and 
gazed unsteadily into his face. 

" They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, 
wringing his hands with earnestness, " You must have seen 
my daughter, for she makes a grand figure in the world, and every- 
body goes to see her. Did she send any word to her old father, 
or say when she was coming back ? " 

Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That 
daughter, from whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, 
was the Esther of our tale, the very girl whom, with such cold 
and remorseless purpose, Ethan Brand had made the subject of 
a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps 
annihilated her soul, in the process. 

" Yes," murmured he, turning away from the hoary wanderer ; 
" it is no delusion. There is an Unpardonable Sin ! " 

While these things were passing, a merry scene was going 
forward in the area of cheerful light, beside the spring and 
before the door of the hut. A number of the youth of the 
village, young men and girls, had hurrried up the hillside, 
impelled by curiosity to see Ethan Brand, the hero of so many 
a legend familiar to their childhood. Finding nothing, however, 
very remarkable in his aspect, — nothing but a sun-burnt way- 
farer, in plain garb and dusty shoes, who sat looking into the 
fire, as if he fancied pictures among the coals, — these young 
people speedily grew tired of observing him. As it happened, 
there was other amusement at hand. An old German Jew, 
travelling with a diorama on his back, was passing down the 
mountain-road towards the village just as the party turned aside 
from it, and, in hopes of eking out the profits of the day, the 
showman had kept them company to the lime-kiln. 

" Come, old Dutchman," cried one of the young men, " let us 
see your pictures, if you can swear they are worth looking at ! " 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 69 

"O, yes, Captain," answered the Jew, — whether as a matter 
of courtesy or craft, he styled everybody Captain, — "I shall 
show you, indeed, some very superb pictures ! " 

So, placing his box in a proper position, he invited the young 
men and girls to look through the glass orifices of the machine, 
and proceeded to exhibit a series of the most outrageous scratch- 
ings and daubings, as specimens of the fine arts, that ever an 
itinerant showman had the face to impose upon his circle of 
spectators. The pictures were worn out, moreover, tattered, 
full of cracks and wrinkles, dingy with tobacco-smoke, and 
otherwise in a most pitiable condition. Some purported to be 
cities, public edifices, and ruined castles in Europe ; others rep- 
resented Napoleon's battles and Nelson's sea-fights ; and in the 
midst of these would be seen a gigantic, brown, hairy hand, — 
which might have been mistaken for the Hand of Destiny, 
though, in truth, it was only the showman's, — pointing its fore- 
finger to various scenes of the conflict, while its owner gave 
historical illustrations. When, with much merriment at its 
abominable deficiency of merit, the exhibition was concluded, 
the German bade little Joe put his head into the box. Viewed 
through the magnifying glasses, the boy's round, rosy visage 
assumed the strangest imaginable aspect of an immense Titanic 
child, the mouth grinning broadly, and the eyes and every other 
feature overflowing with fun at the joke. Suddenly, however, 
that merry face turned pale, and its expression changed to hor- 
ror, for this easily impressed and excitable child had become 
sensible that the eye of Ethan Brand was fixed upon him through 
the glass. 

" You make the little man to be afraid. Captain," said the 
German Jew, turning up the dark and strong outline of his vis- 
age, from his stooping posture. " But look again, and, by 
chance, I shall cause you to see somewhat that is very fine, 
upon my word ! " 

Ethan Brand gazed into the box for an instant, and then 
starting back, looked fixedly at the German. What had he 
seen? Nothing, apparently; for a curious youth, who had 
peeped in almost at the same moment, beheld only a vacant 
space of canvas. 



70 ETHAN BRAND 

" I remember you now," muttered Ethan Brand to the show- 
man. 

" Ah, Captain," whispered the Jew of Nuremburg, with a dark 
smile, " I find it to be a heavy matter in my show-box, — this 
Unpardonable Sin ! By my faith. Captain, it has wearied my 
shoulders this long day, to carry it over the mountain." 

" Peace," answered Ethan Brand, sternly, " or get thee into 
the furnace yonder ! " 

The Jew's exhibition had scarcely concluded, when a great, 
elderly dog, ■ — who seemed to be his own master, as no person 
in the company laid claim to him, — saw fit to render himself 
the object of public notice. Hitherto, he had shown himself 
a very quiet, well-disposed old dog, going round from one to 
another, and, by way of being sociable, offering his rough head 
to be patted by any kindly hand that would take so much trou- 
ble. But now, all of a sudden, this grave and venerable quad- 
ruped, of his own mere motion, and without the slightest 
suggestion from anybody else, began to run round after his 
tail, which, to heighten the absurdity of the proceeding, was a 
great deal shorter than it should have been. Never was seen 
such headlong eagerness in pursuit of an object that could not 
possibly be attained ; never was heard such a tremendous out- 
break of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping, — as if one 
end of the ridiculous brute's body were at deadly and most un- 
forgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round 
about went the cur ; and faster and still faster fled the unap- 
proachable brevity of his tail ; and louder and fiercer grew his 
yells of rage and animosity ; until, utterly exhausted, and as far 
from the goal as ever, the foolish old dog ceased his performance 
as suddenly as he had begun it. The next moment he was as 
mild, quiet, sensible, and respectable in his deportment, as when 
he first scraped acquaintance with the company. 

As may be supposed, the exhibition was greeted with universal 
laughter, clapping of hands, and shouts of encore, to which the 
canine performer responded by wagging all that there was to 
wag of his tail, but appeared totally unable to repeat his very 
successful effort to amuse the spectators. 

Meanwhile, Ethan Brand had resumed his seat upon the log, 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 7 1 

and moved, it might be, by a perception of some remote analogy 
between his own case and that of this self-pursuing cur, he broke 
into the awful laugh, which, more than any other token, expressed 
the condition of his inward being. From that moment, the mer- 
riment of the party was at an end ; they stood aghast, dreading 
lest the inauspicious sound should be reverberated around the 
horizon, and that mountain would thunder it to mountain, and 
so the horror be prolonged upon their ears. Then, whispering 
one to another that it was late, — that the moon was almost 
down, — that the August night was growing chill, — they hurried 
homewards, leaving the lime-burner and little Joe to deal as 
they might with their unwelcome guest. Save for these three 
human beings, the open space on the hillside was a solitude, 
set in a vast gloom of forest. Beyond that darksome verge, the 
firelight glimmered on the stately trunks and almost black foli- 
age of pines, intermixed with the lighter verdure of sapling oaks, 
maples, and poplars, while here and there lay the gigantic corpses 
of dead trees, decaying on the leaf-strewn soil. And it seemed 
to little Joe — a timorous and imaginative child — that the silent 
forest was holding its breath, until some fearful thing should 
happen. 

Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the 
door of the kiln ; then looking over his shoulder at the lime- 
burner and his son, he bade, rather than advised, them to rest. 

" For myself, I cannot sleep," said he. " I have matters that 
it concerns me to meditate upon. I will watch the fire, as I 
used to do in the old time." 

" And call the devil out of the furnace to keep you company, 
I suppose," muttered Bartram, who had been making intimate 
acquaintance with the black bottle above-mentioned. " But 
watch, if you like, and call as many devils as you like ! For 
my part, I shall be all the better for a snooze. Come, Joe ! " 

As the boy followed his father into the hut, he looked back 
at the wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender 
spirit had an intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in 
which this man had enveloped himself. 

When they had gone, Ethan Brand sat listening to the crack- 
ling of the kindled wood, and looking at the little spirts of fire 



72 ETHAN BRAND 

that issued through the chinks of the door. These trifles, how- 
ever, once so familiar, had but the slightest hold of his atten- 
tion, while deep within his mind he was reviewing the gradual 
but marvellous change that had been wrought upon him by the 
search to which he had devoted himself. He remembered how 
the night dew had fallen upon him, — how the dark forest had 
whispered to him, — how the stars had gleamed upon him — a 
simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone by, 
and ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what 
tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what 
pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate 
those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his 
life ; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of 
man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however 
desecrated, still to be held sacred by a brother ; with what 
awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and 
prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to 
him. Then ensued that vast intellectual development, which, 
in its progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind 
and heart. The Idea that possessed his life had operated as a 
means of education ; it had gone on cultivating his powers to 
the highest point of which they were susceptible ; it had raised 
him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star- 
lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden wdth 
the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. 
So much for the intellect ! But where was the heart ? That, 
indeed, had withered — had contracted — had hardened — had 
perished ! It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He 
had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was 
no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons 
of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave 
him a right to share in all its secrets ; he was now a cold 
observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, 
and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, 
and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime 
as were demanded for his study. 

Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend; He began to be so from 
the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 73 

of improvement with his intellect. And now, as his highest 
effort and inevitable development, — as the bright and gorgeous 
flower, and rich, delicious fruit of his life's labor, — he had pro- 
duced the Unpardonable Sin ! 

" What more have I to seek ? What more to achieve ? " said 
Ethan Brand to himself. " My task is done, and well done ! " 

Starting from the log with a certain alacrity in his gait, and 
ascending the hillock of earth that was raised against the stone 
circumference of the lime-kiln, he thus reached the top of the 
structure. It was a space of perhaps ten feet across, from edge 
to edge, presenting a view of the upper surface of the immense 
mass of broken marble with which the kiln was heaped. All 
these innumerable blocks and fragments of marble were red-hot 
and vividly on fire, sending up great spouts of blue flame, which 
quivered aloft and danced madly, as within a magic circle, and 
sank and rose again, with continual and multitudinous activity. 
As the lonely man bent forward over this terrible body of fire, 
the blasting heat smote up against his person with a breath that, 
it might be supposed, would have scorched and shrivelled him 
up in a moment. 

Ethan Brand stood erect, and raised his arms on high. The 
blue flames played upon his face, and imparted the wild and 
ghastly light which alone could have suited its expression ; it 
was that of a fiend on the verge of plunging into his gulf of 
intensest torhient. 

" O Mother Earth," cried he, " who art no more my Mother, 
and into whose bosom this frame shall never be resolved ! O 
mankind, whose brotherhood I have cast off, and trampled thy 
great heart beneath my feet ! O stars of heaven, that shone on 
me of old, as if to light me onward and upward ! — farewell all, 
and forever ! Come, deadly element of Fire, — henceforth my 
familiar friend ! Embrace me, as I do thee ! " 

That night the sound of a fearful peal of laughter rolled heav- 
ily through the sleep of the lime-burner and his little son ; dim 
shapes of horror and anguish haunted their dreams, and seemed 
still present in the rude hovel, when they opened their eyes to 
the daylight. 

" Up, boy, up ! " cried the lime-burner, staring about him. 



74 ETHAN BRAND 

" Thank Heaven, the night is gone, at last ; and rather than 
pass such another, I would watch my lime-kiln, wide awake, for 
a twelvemonth. This Ethan Brand, with his humbug of an 
Unpardonable Sin, has done me no such mighty favor, in taking 
my place ! " 

He issued from the hut, followed by little Joe, who kept fast 
hold of his father's hand. The early sunshine was already pour- 
ing its gold upon the mountain-tops ; and though the valleys 
were still in shadow, they smiled cheerfully in the promise of the 
bright day that was hastening onward. The village, completely 
shut in by hills, which swelled away gently about it, looked as if 
it had rested peacefully in the hollow of the great hand of Provi- 
dence. Every dwelling was distinctly visible ; the Uttle spires 
of the two churches pointed upwards, and caught a fore-glim- 
mering of brightness from the sun-gilt skies upon their gilded 
weather-cocks. The tavern was astir, and the figure of the old, 
smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth, was seen beneath the 
stoop. Old Graylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his 
head. Scattered likewise over the breasts of tTie surrounding 
mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, 
some of them far down into the valley, others high up towards 
the summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, 
hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Step- 
ping from one to another of the clouds that rested on the hills, 
and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed 
almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly 
regions. Earth was so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream 
to look at it. 

To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Na- 
ture so readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was 
rattling down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his 
horn, while echo caught up the notes, and intertwined them into 
a rich and varied and elaborate harmony, of which the original 
performer could lay claim to little share. The great hills played 
a concert among themselves, each contributing a strain of airy 
sweetness. 

Little Joe's face brightened at once. 

" Dear father," cried he, skipping cheerily to and fro, " that 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 75 

Strange man is gone, and the sky and the mountains all seem 
glad of it!" 

" Yes," growled the lime-burner, with an oath, " but he has 
let the fire go down, and no thanks to him if five hundred bush- 
els of lime are not spoiled. If I catch the fellow hereabouts 
again, I shall feel like tossing him into the furnace ! " 

With his long pole in his hand, he ascended to the top of the 
kiln. After a moment's pause, he called to his son. 

" Come up here, Joe ! " said he. 

So little Joe ran up the hillock, and stood by his father's side. 
The marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on 
its surface, in the midst of the circle, — snow-white too, and 
thoroughly converted into lime, — lay a human skeleton, in the 
attitude of a person who, after long toil, lies down to long re- 
pose. Within the ribs — strange to say — was the shape of a 
human heart. 

" Was the fellow's heart made of marble ? " cried Bartram, in 
some perplexity at this phenomenon. " At any rate, it is burnt 
into what looks like special good lime ; and taking all the bones 
together, my kiln is half a bushel the richer for him." 

So saying, the rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and, letting it 
fall upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crumbled 
into fragments. 

MARKHEIM 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

[First published in 1885. The text is that of The Meriy Men and Other 
Tales and Fal'les, 1887.] 

" Yes," said the dealer, " our windfalls are of various kinds. 
Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my 
superior knowledge. Some are dishonest," and here he held up 
the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, " and in 
that case," he continued, " I profit by my virtue." 

Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and 
his eyes had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and 
darkness in the shop. At these pointed words, and before the 



J6 MARKHEIM 

near presence of the flame, he bUnked painfully and looked 
aside. 

The dealer chuckled. " You come to me on Christmas Day," 
he resumed, " when you know that I am alone in my house, put 
up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you 
will have to pay for that ; you will have to pay for my loss of time, 
when I should be balancing my books ; you will have to pay, be- 
sides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you to-day very 
strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward 
questions \ but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he 
has to pay for it." The dealer once more chuckled ; and then, 
changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of 
irony, " You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came 
into the possession of the object ? " he continued, " Still your 
uncle's cabinet ? A remarkable collector, sir ! " 

And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on 
tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding 
his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his 
gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch of horror. 

" This time," said he, " you are in error. I have not come to 
sell, but to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle's cabi- 
net is bare to the wainscot ; even were it still intact, I have done 
well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than 
otherwise, and my errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a 
Christmas present for a lady," he continued, waxing more fluent 
as he struck into the speech he had prepared ; " and certainly I 
owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a 
matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday ; I must produce 
my little compliment at dinner ; and, as you very well know, a 
rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected." 

There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to 
weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks 
among the curious lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of 
the cabs in a near thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence. 

"Well, sir," said the dealer, "be it so. You are an old cus- 
tomer after aU ; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good 
marriage, far be it from me to be ah obstacle. Here is a nice 
thing for a lady now," he went on, "this hand glass — fifteenth 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 77 

century, warranted \ comes from a good collection, too ; but I 
reserve the name, in the interests of my customer, who was just 
like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a remark- 
able collector." 

The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, 
had stooped to take the object from its place ; and, as he had 
done so, a shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of 
hand and foot, a sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the 
face. It passed as swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a 
certain trembling of the hand that now received the glass. 

" A glass," he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it 
more clearly. " A glass? For Christmas? Surely not? " 

" And why not? " cried the dealer. " Why not a glass? " 

Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expres- 
sion. "You ask me why not?" he said. " Why, look here — 
look in it — look at yourself ! Do you like to see it ? No ! nor 
I — nor any man." 

The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so sud- 
denly confronted him with the mirror ; but now, perceiving there 
was nothing worse on hand, he chuckled. " Your future lady, sir, 
must be pretty hard favored," said he. 

" I ask you," said Markheim, " for a Christmas present, and you 
give me this — this damned reminder of years, and sins and 
follies — this hand-conscience ! Did you mean it ? Had you a 
thought in your mind ? Tell me. It will be better for you if you 
do. Come, tell me about yourself. I hazard a guess now, that 
you are in secret a very charitable man?" 

The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, 
Markheim did not appear to be laughing ; there was something in 
his face like an eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth. 

" What are you driving at? " the dealer asked. 

" Not charitable ? " returned the other, gloomily. " Not chari- 
table ; not pious ; not scrupulous ; unloving, unbeloved ; a hand 
to get money, a safe to keep it. Is that all? Dear Gel, man, is 
that all?" 

" I will tell you what it is," began the dealer, with some sharp- 
ness, and then broke off again into a chuckle. " But I see this is a 
love match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady's health." 



y8 ' MARKHEIM 

" Ah ! " cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. " Ah, have 
you been in love? Tell me about that." 

" I," cried the dealer. " I in love ! I never had the time, nor 
have I the time to-day for all this nonsense. Will you take the 
glass?" 

" Where is the hurry? " returned Markheim. " It is very pleas- 
ant to stand here talking ; and life is so short and insecure that I 
would not hurry away from any pleasure — no, not even from so 
mild a one as this. We should rather cHng, cling to what little we 
can get, like a man at a clifPs edge. Every second is a cliff, if 
you think upon it — a cliff a mile high — high enough, if we fall, 
to dash us out of every feature of humanity. Hence it is best to 
talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other ; why should we wear 
this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows, we might be- 
come friends?" 

" I have just one word to say to you," said the dealer. " Either 
make your purchase, or walk out of my shop." 

" True, true," said Markheim. " Enough fooling. To business. 
Show me something else." 

The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass 
upon the shelf, his thin blond hair falhng over his eyes as he did 
so. Markheim moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket 
of his greatcoat ; he drew himself up and filled his lungs ; at the 
same time many different emotions were depicted together on his 
face — terror, horror, and resolve, fascination and a physical repul- 
sion ; and through a haggard lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked 
out. 

" This, perhaps, may suit," observed the dealer ; and then, as 
he began to rearise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his 
victim. The long, skewerlike dagger flashed and fell. The 
dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and 
then tumbled on the floor in a heap. 

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately 
and slow as was becoming to their great age ; others garrulous 
and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus 
of tickings. Then the passage of a lad's feet, heavily running on 
the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled 
Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He looked 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 79 

about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame 
solemnly wagging in a draught ; and by that inconsiderable move- 
ment, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept 
heaving like a sea : the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of 
darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of 
the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like 
images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that 
leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger. 

From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim's eyes returned to 
the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, 
incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, 
miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so 
much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo ! it was 
nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and 
pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie ; 
there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle 
of locomotion — there it must lie till it was found. Found ! ay, 
and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would 
ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. 
Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy. "Time was that when 
the brains were out," he thought ; and the first word struck into 
his mind. Time, nov/ that the deed was accomplished — time, 
which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momen- 
tous for the slayer. 

The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then 
another, with every variety of pace and voice — one deep as the 
bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes 
the prelude of a waltz — the clocks began to strike the hour of 
three in the afternoon. 

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber 
staggered him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with 
the candle, beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the 
soul by chance reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home 
designs, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated 
and repeated, as it were an army of spies ; his own eyes met and 
detected him ; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, 
vexed the surrounding quiet. And still as he continued to fill his 
pockets, his mind accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the 



8o MARKHEIM 

thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more 
quiet hour ; he should have prepared an alibi ; he should not have 
used a knife ; he should have been more cautious, and only bound 
and gagged the dealer, and not killed him ; he should have been 
more bold, and killed the servant also ; he should have done all 
things otherwise ; poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the 
mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now 
useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, 
and behind alfthis activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats 
in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain 
with riot ; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoul- 
der, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish ; or he beheld, in 
galloping defile, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black 
coffin. 

Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like 
a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some 
rumor of the struggle must have reached their ears and set on 
edge their curiosity ; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he 
divined them sitting motionless and with uplifted ear — solitary 
people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memo- 
ries of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that tender exer- 
cise ; happy family parties, struck into silence round the table, 
the mother still with raised finger : every degree and age and 
humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and 
weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it seemed to 
him he could not move too softly ; the clink of the tall Bohemian 
goblets rang out loudly like a bell ; and alarmed by the bigness of 
the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then, again, 
with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place 
appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the 
passer-by ; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud 
among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate 
bravadb, the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house. 

But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while 
one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trem- 
bled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took 
a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with 
white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 8 1 

surmise on the pavement — these could at worst suspect, they 
could not know ; through the brick walls and shuttered windows 
only sounds could penetrate. But here, within the house, was he 
alone ? He knew he was ; he had watched the servant set forth 
sweethearting, in her poor best, "out for the day" written in 
every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course ; and yet, 
in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a 
stir of dehcate footing — he was surely conscious, inexplicably 
conscious of some presence. Ay, surely ; to every room and 
corner of the house his imagination followed it ; and now it was 
a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with ; and again it was 
a shadow of himself; and yet again behold the image of the dead 
dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred. 

At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open 
door which still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, 
the skylight small and dirty, the day blind with fog ; and the 
light that filtered down to the ground story was exceedingly faint, 
and showed dimly on the threshold of the shop. And yet, in 
that strip of doubtful brightness, did there not hang wavering a 
shadow ? 

Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman be- 
gan to beat with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows 
with shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually 
called upon by name. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the 
dead man. But no ! he lay quite still ; he was fled away far be- 
yond earshot of these blows and shoutings ; he was sunk beneath 
seas of silence ; and his name, which would once have caught his 
notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound. 
And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from his knocking 
and departed. 

Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to 
get forth from this accusing neighbourhood, to plunge into a bath 
of London multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, 
that haven of safety and apparent innocence — his bed. One 
visitor had come : at any moment another might follow and be 
more obstinate. To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the 
profit, would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was 
now Markheim's concern ; and as a means to that, the keys. 

G 



82 MARKIIEIM 

He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the 
shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious 
repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew 
near the body of his victim. The human character had quite 
departed. Like a suit half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scat- 
tered, the trunk doubled, on the floor ; and yet the thing repelled 
him. Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the eye, he feared 
it might have more significance to the touch. He took the body 
by the shoulders, and turned it on its back. It was strangely 
light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had been broken, fell 
into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all expression; 
but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with blood 
about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing 
circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain 
fair day in a fishers' village : a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd 
upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the 
nasal voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried 
over head in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, 
until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld 
a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, 
garishly colored : Brownrigg with her apprentice ; the Mannings 
with their murdered guest ; VVeare in the death-grip of Thurtell ; 
and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing was as clear as 
an illusion : he was once again that little boy ; he was looking once 
again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at these vile 
pictures ; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums. A 
bar of that day's music returned upon his memory ; and at that, for 
the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden 
weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer. 

He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these 
considerations ; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bend- 
ing his mind to realize the nature and greatness of his crime. So 
little a while ago that face had moved with every change of senti- 
ment, that pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire 
with governable energies: and now, and by his act, that piece of 
life had been arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, 
arrests the beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain ; he 
could rise to no more remorseful consciousness ; the same heart 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 83 

which had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime, looked 
on its reahty unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one 
who had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that can 
make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had never 
lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a tremor. 

With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he 
found the keys and advanced towards the open door of the shop. 
Outside, it had begun to rain smartly ; and the sound of the 
shower upon the roof had banished silence. Like some dripping 
cavern, the chambers of the house were haunted by an incessant 
echoing, which filled the ear and mingled with the ticking of the 
clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door, he seemed to 
hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of another 
foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated loosely 
on the threshold. He threw a ton's weight of resolve upon his 
muscles, and drew back the door. 

The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and 
stairs ; on the bright suit of armour posted, halbert in hand, upon 
the landing ; and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures 
that hung against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was 
the beating of the rain through all the house that, in Markheim's 
ears, it began to be distinguished into many diiferent sounds. 
Footsteps and sighs, the tread of regiments marching in the dis- 
tance, the chink of money in the counting, and the creaking of 
doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to mingle with the patter of the 
drops upon the cupola and the gushing of the water in the pipes. 
The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to the verge of 
madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by presences. 
He heard them moving in the upper chambers ; from the shop, he 
heard the dead man getting to his legs ; and as he began with a 
great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and 
followed stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how 
tranquilly he would possess his soul ! And then again, and heark- 
ening with ever fresh attention, he blessed himself for that unrest- 
ing sense which held the outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon 
his life. His head turned continually on his neck ; his eyes, which 
seemed starting from their orbits, scouted on every side, and on 
every side were half-rewarded as with the tail of something name- 



\;kA 



'•yTHAo 



84 MARKHEIM 

less vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps to the first floor were 
four-and-tvventy agonies. 

On that first storey, the doors stood ajar, three of them 
Uke three ambushes, shaking his nerves hke the throats of 
cannon. He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured 
and fortified from men's observing eyes ; he longed to be home, 
girt in by walls, buried among bedclothes, and invisible to 
all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recol- 
lecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to 
entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. 
He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable 
procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his 
crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, 
some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some wilful 
illegahty of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the 
rules, calculating consequence from cause ; and what if nature, as 
the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the 
mould of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so 
writers said) when the winter changed the time of its appearance. 
The like might befall Markheim : the solid walls might become 
transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive ; 
the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and 
detain him in their clutch ; ay, and there were soberer accidents 
that might destroy him : if, for instance, the house should fall and 
imprison him beside the>body of his victim; or the house next 
door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides. 
These things he feared ; and, in a sense, these things might be 
called the hands of God reached forth against sin. But about 
God himself he was at ease ; his act was doubtless exceptional, 
but so were his excuses, which God knew ; it was there, and not 
among men, that he felt sure of justice. 

When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door 
behind' him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room 
was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with pack- 
ing cases and incongruous furniture ; several great pier-glasses, in 
which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage ; 
many pictures, framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to 
the wall ; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 8$ 

a great old bed, with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to 
the floor ; but by great good fortune the lower part of the shutters 
had been closed, and this concealed him from the neighbors. 
Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing case before the cabinet, 
and began to search among the keys. It was a long business, for 
there were many ; and it was irksome, besides ; for, after all, there 
might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the wing. But 
the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the tail of 
his eye he saw the door — even glanced at it from time to time 
directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good 
estate of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain 
falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on 
the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of 
a hymn, and the voices of many children took up the air and 
words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody ! How 
fresh the youthful voices ! Markheim gave ear to it smihngly, as 
he sorted out the keys ; and his mind was thronged with answer- 
able ideas and images ; church-going children and the pealing of 
the high organ ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers 
on the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navi- 
gated sky ; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again 
to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high 
genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and 
the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten 
Commandments in the chancel. 

And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to 
his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, 
went over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step 
mounted the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was 
laid upon the knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened. 

Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, 
whether the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human 
justice, or some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign 
him to the gallows. But when a face was thrust into the aperture, 
glanced round the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if 
in friendly recognition, and then withdrew again, and the door 
closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his control in a hoarse 
cry. At the sound of this the visitant returned. 



86 MARKHEIM 

"Did you call me?" he asked pleasantly, and with that he 
entered the room and closed the door behind him. 

Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps 
there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the newcomer 
seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the waver- 
ing candle-light of the shop ; and at times he thought he knew 
him ; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and 
always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the 
conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God. 

And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace, as 
he stood looking on Markheim with a smile ; and when he added, 
"You are looking for the money, I believe?" it was in the tones 
of everyday politeness. 

Markheim made no answer. 

"I should warn you," resumed the other, "that the maid has 
left her sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If 
Mr. Markheim be found in this house, I need not describe to him 
the consequences." 

"You know me?" cried the murderer. 

The visitor smiled. " You have long been a favorite of mine," 
he said ; " and I have long observed and often sought to help you." 

" What are you ? " cried Markheim ; " the devil ? " 

" What I may be," returned the other, " cannot affect the ser- 
vice I propose to render you." 

"It can," cried Markheim; "it does! Be helped by you? 
No, never ; not by you ! You do not know me yet ; thank God, 
you do not know me ! " 

" I know you," replied the. visitant, with a sort of kind severity 
or rather firmness. " I know you to the soul." 

" Know me ! " cried Markheim. " Who can do so? My life is but 
a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. 
All men do ; all men are better than this disguise that grows about 
and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom 
bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own 
control — if you could see their faces, they would be altogether 
different, they would shine out for heroes and saints ! I am worse 
than most ; myself is more overlaid ; my excuse is known to me 
and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself." 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 8/ 

"To me?" inquired the visitant. 

" To you before all," returned the murderer. " I supposed you 
were intelligent. I thought — since you exist — you would prove 
a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me 
by my acts ! Think of it ; my acts ! I was born and I have lived 
in a land of giants ; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I 
was born out of my mother — the giants of circumstance. And 
you would judge me by my acts ! But can you not look within? 
Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me ? Can you not 
see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by 
any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you 
not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity 
— the unwilling sinner?" 

" All this is very feelingly expressed," was the reply, " but it 
regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my 
province, and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may 
have been dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right 
direction. But time flies ; the servant delays, looking in the faces 
of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she 
keeps moving nearer ; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself 
was striding towards you through the Christmas streets ! Shall 
I help you ; I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to find the 
money? " 

" For what price? " asked Markheim. 

" I offer you the service for a Christmas gift," returned the 
other. 

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter 
triumph. " No," said he, " I will take nothing at your hands ; 
if I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher 
to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse. It may be credu- 
lous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil." 

" I have no objection to a death-bed repentance," observed the 
visitant. 

" Because you disbelieve their efiicacy ! " Markheim cried. 

" I do not say so," returned the other ; " but I look on these 
things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest 
falls. The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks 
under colour of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you 



88 MARKHEIM 

do, in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he 
draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of ser- 
vice — to repent, to die smiling, and thus to^build up in confi- 
dence and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I 
am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please 
yourself in life as you have done hitherto ; please yourself more 
amply, spread your elbows at the board ; and when the night be- 
gins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your 
greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your 
quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with 
God. I came but now from such a death-bed, and the room was 
full of sincere mourners, listening to the man's last words : and 
when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against 
mercy, I found it smiling with hope." 

"And do you, then, suppose me such a creature? " asked Mark- 
heim. " Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than 
to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at last, sneak into heaven? My 
heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of man- 
kind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you pre- 
sume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious 
as to dry up the very springs of good ? " 

" Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All 
sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like 
starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of 
famine and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond 
the moment of their acting ; I find in all that the last consequence 
is death ; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother 
with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visi- 
bly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say 
that I follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the 
thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of 
Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action, but in char- 
acter.' The bad man is dear to me ; not the bad act, whose fruits, 
if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of 
the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest 
virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but because 
you are Markheim, that I offered to forward your escape." 

" I will lay my heart open to you," answered Markheim. " This, 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 89 

crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have 
learned many lessons ; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. 
Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not ; I 
was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are 
robust virtues that can stand in these temptations ; mine was not 
so : I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day, and out of this deed, 
I pluck both warning and riches — both the power and a fresh 
resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the 
world ; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents 
of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of 
the past ; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings 
to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed 
tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my 
mother. There hes my life ; I have wandered a few years, but 
now I see once more my city of destination." 

"You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?" 
remarked the visitor ; " and there, if I mistake not, you have 
already lost some thousands?" 

"Ah," said Markheim, " but this time I have a sure thing." 

"This time, again, you will lose," replied the visitor, quietly. 

" Ah, but I keep back the half ! " cried Markheim. 

"That also you will lose," said the other. 

The sweat started upon Markheim's brow. " Well, then, what 
matter?" he exclaimed. "Say it be lost, say I am plunged again 
in poverty, shall one part of me, and that the worse, continue 
until the end to override the better? Evil and good run strong 
in me, haling me both ways. I do not love the one thing, I love 
all. I can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms ; and 
though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger 
to my thoughts. I pity the poor ; who knows their trials better 
than myself ? I pity and help them ; I prize love, I love honest 
laughter ; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I 
love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, 
and my virtues to he without effect, like some passive lumber of 
the mind? Not so ; good, also, is a spring of acts." 

But the visitant raised his finger. " For six-and-thirty years that 
you have been in this world," said he, " through many changes of 
fortune and varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. 



90 MARKHEIM 

Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years 
back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there 
any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still 
recoil? — five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! 
Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can anything but 
death avail to stop you." 

" It is true," Markheim said huskily, " I have in some degree 
complied with evil. But it is so with all : the very saints, in the 
mere exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of 
their surroundings." 

" I will propound to you one simple question," said the other ; 
" and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. 
You have grown in many things more lax ; possibly you do right 
to be so ; and at any account, it is the same with all men. But 
granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more 
difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all 
things with a looser rein?" 

"In any one?" repeated Markheim, with an anguish of con- 
sideration. " No," he added, with despair, " in none ! I have 
gone down in all." 

"Then," said the visitor, "content yourself with what you are, 
for you will never change ; and the words of your part on this 
stage are irrevocably written down." 

Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the 
visitor who first broke the silence. "That being so," he said, 
"shall I show you the money?" 

" And grace ? " cried Markheim. 

" Have you not tried it ? " returned the other. "Two or three 
years ago, did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, 
and was not your voice the loudest in the hymn? " 

" It is true," said Markheim ; " and I see clearly what remains 
for me by way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul ; 
my eyf s are opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am." 

At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through 
the house ; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted 
signal for which he had been waiting, changed at once in his 
demeanour. 

"The maid!" he cried. "She has returned, as I forewarned 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 9 1 

you, and there is now before you one more difificult passage. Her 
master, you must say, is ill ; you must let her in, with an assured 
but rather serious countenance — no smiles, no overacting, and I 
promise you success ! Once the girl within, and the door closed, 
the same dexterity that has already rid you of the dealer will 
relieve you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward you 
have the whole evening — the whole night, if needful — to ran- 
sack the treasures of the house and to make good your safety. 
This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up ! " 
he cried ; " up, friend ; your life hangs trembling in the scales ; 
up, and act ! " 

Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. " If I be con- 
demned to evil acts," he said, " there is still one door of freedom 
open — I can cease from action. If my Ufe be an ill thing, I can 
lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every 
small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself 
beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barren- 
ness ; it may, and let it be ! But I have still my hatred of evil ; 
and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I 
can draw both energy and courage." 

The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and 
lovely change : they brightened and softened with a tender 
triumph ; and, even as they brightened, faded and dishmned. 
But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the trans- 
formation. He opened the door and went downstairs very 
slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him ; 
he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as 
chance-medley — a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, 
tempted him no longer ; but on the further side he perceived a 
quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked 
into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. 
It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his 
mind, as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke 
out into impatient clamour. 

He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like 
a smile. 

"You had better go for the police," said he; "I have killed 
your master." 



92 AMONG THE CORN- ROWS 

AMONG THE CORN-ROWS 

HAMLIN GARLAND 

[From Afain- Travelled Roads. This is the second part of the story. In 
the first part Rob is in Dakota. " He was from one of the finest counties of 
Wisconsin, over toward Milwaukee. He was of German parentage, a middle- 
sized, cheery, wide-awake, good-looking young fellow — a typical claim-holder. 
He was always confident, jovial, and full of plans for the future. He had dug 
his own well, built his own shanty, washed and mended his own clothing. He 
could do anything and do it well. He had a fine field of wheat, and was finish- 
ing the ploughing of his entire quarter-section." He determines to go back to 
Wisconsin, find a wife, and return with her in ten days.] 

A CORN-FIELD in July is a sultry place. The soil is hot and dry ; 
the wind comes across the lazily-murmuring leaves laden with a 
warm, sickening smell drawn from the rapidly growing, broad- 
flung banners of the corn. The sun, nearly vertical, drops a flood 
of dazzUng light upon the field over which the cool shadows run, 
only to make the heat seem the more intense. 

Julia Peterson, faint with hunger, was toiling back and forth 
between the corn-rows, holding the handles of the double-shovel 
corn-plough, while her little brother Otto rode the steaming horse. 
Her heart was full of bitterness, her face flushed with heat, and 
her muscles aching with fatigue. The heat grew terrible. The 
corn came to her shoulders, and not a breath seemed to reach her, 
while the sun, nearing the noon mark, lay pitilessly upon her 
shoulders, protected only by a calico dress. The dust rose under 
her feet, and as she was wet with perspiration it soiled her till, 
with a woman's instinctive cleanliness, she shuddered. Her head 
throbbed dangerously. What matter to her that the kingbird 
pitched jovially from the maples to catch a wandering bluebottle 
fly, that the robin was feeding its young, that the bobohnk was 
singing? All these things, if she saw them, only threw her bond- 
age to labor into greater relief. 

Across the field, in another patch of corn, she could see her 
father — a big, gruff- voiced, wide-bearded Norwegian — -at work 
also with a plough. The corn must be ploughed, and so she toiled 
on, the tears dropping from the shadow of the ugly sun-bonnet 



HAMLIN GARLAND 



93 



she wore. Her shoes, coarse and square-toed, chafed her feet ; 
her hands, large and strong, were browned, or, more properly, 
burnt, on the backs by the sun. The horse's harness " creak- 
cracked " as he swung steadily and patiently forward, the moisture 
pouring from his sides, his nostrils distended. 

The field bordered on a road, and on the other side of the road 
ran a river — a broad, clear, shallow expanse at that point, and the 
eyes of the boy gazed longingly at the pond and the cool shadow 
each time that he turned at the fence. 

" Say, Jule, I'm goin' in ! Come, can't I? Come — say ! " he 
pleaded, as they stopped at the fence to let the horse breathe. 

" I've let you go wade twice." 

" But that don't do any good. My legs is all smarty, 'cause ol' 
Jack sweats so." The boy turned around on the horse's back and 
slid back to his rump. " I can't stand it ! " he burst out, sliding 
off and darting under the fence. " Father can't see." 

The girl put her elbows on the fence and watched her little 
brother as he sped away to the pool, throwing off his clothes as 
he ran, whooping with uncontrollable delight. Soon she could 
hear him splashing about in the water a short distance up the 
stream, and caught glimpses of his little shiny body and happy 
face. How cool that water looked ! And the shadows there by 
the big basswood ! How that water would cool her blistered 
feet. An impulse seized her, and she squeezed between the rails 
of the fence, and stood in the road looking up and down to see 
that the way was clear. It was not a main-travelled road ; no one 
was likely to come ; why not ? 

She hurriedly took off her shoes and stockings — how delicious 
the cool, soft velvet of the grass ! and sitting down on the bank 
under the great basswood, whose roots formed an abrupt bank, 
she slid her poor blistered, chafed feet into the water, her bare 
head leaned against the huge tree-trunk. 

And now, as she rested, the beauty of the scene came to her. 
Over her the wind moved the leaves. A jay screamed far off, as if 
answering the cries of the boy. A kingfisher crossed and recrossed 
the stream with dipping sweep of his wings. The river sang with 
its lips to the pebbles. The vast clouds went by majestically, far 
above the tree-tops, and the snap and buzzing and ringing whir of 



94 AMONG THE CORN-ROWS 

July insects made a ceaseless, slumberous undertone of song solvent 
of all else. The tired girl forgot her work. She began to dream. 
This would not last always. Some one would come to release her 
from such drudgery. This was her constant, tenderest, and most 
secret dream. He would be a Yankee, not a Norwegian. The 
Yankees didn't ask their wives to work in the field. He would 
have a home. Perhaps he'd live in town — perhaps a merchant ! 
And then she thought of the drug clerk in Rock River who had 
looked at her — A voice broke in on her dream, a fresh, manly voice. 

" Well, by jinks ! if it ain't JuUa ! Just the one I wanted to 
see ! " 

The girl turned, saw a pleasant-faced young fellow in a derby 
hat and a cutaway suit of diagonals. 

" Bob Rodemaker ! How come — " 

She remembered her situation and flushed, looked down at the 
water, and remained perfectly still. 

"Ain't you goin' to shake hands? Y' don't seem very glad t' 
see me." 

She began to grow angry. " If you had any eyes, you'd see." 

Rob looked over the edge of the bank, whistled, turned away. 
"Oh, I seel Excuse me! Don't blame yeh a bit, though. 
Good weather f'r corn," he went on, looking up at the trees. 
" Corn seems to be pretty well forward," he continued, in a louder 
voice, as he walked away, still gazing into the air. " Crops is 
looking first-class in Boomtown. Hello ! This Otto? H'yare, y' 
little scamp ! Get on to that horse agin. Quick, 'r I'll take y'r 
skin off an' hang it on the fence. What y' been doin' ? " 

" Ben in swimmin'. Jimminy, ain't it fun ! When 'd y' get 
back? " said the boy, grinning. 

" Never you mind ! " repUed Rob, leaping the fence by laying 
his left hand on the top rail. " Get on to that horse." He tossed 
the boy up on the horse, and hung his coat on the fence. " I 
s'pose the ol' man makes her plough, same as usual? " 

" Yup," said Otto. 

"Dod ding a man that'll do that ! I don't mind if it's neces- 
sary, but it ain't necessary in his case." He continued to mutter 
in this way as he went across to the other side of the field. As 
they turned to come back, Rob went up and looked at the horse's 



HAMLIN GARLAND 95 

mouth. " Gettin' purty near of age. Say, who's sparkin' Julia 
now — anybody ? " 

" Nobody 'cept some ol' Norwegians. She won't have them. 
Por wants her to, but she won't." 

"Good f'r her. Nobody comes t' see her Sunday nights, eh?" 

" Nope ; only 'Tias Anderson an' Ole Hoover ; but she goes 
off an' leaves 'em." 

" Chk ! " said Rob, starting old Jack across the field. 

It was almost noon, and Jack moved reluctantly. He knew the 
time of day as well as the boy. He made this round after distinct 
protest. 

In the meantime Julia, putting on her shoes and stockings, went 
to the fence and watched the man's shining white shirt as he 
moved across the corn-field. There had never been any special 
tenderness between them, but she had always liked him. They 
had been at school together. She wondered why he had come 
back at this time of the year, and wondered how long he would 
stay. How long had he stood looking at her? She flushed again 
at the thought of it. But he wasn't to blame ; it was a public 
road. She might have known better. 

She stood under a little popple tree, whose leaves shook musi- 
cally at every zephyr, and her eyes, through half-shut lids, roved 
over the sea of deep-green, glossy leaves, dappled here and there 
by cloud shadows, stirred here and there like water by the wind ; 
and out of it all a longing to be free from such toil rose like a 
breath, fiUing her throat and quickening the motion of her heart. 
Must this go on forever, this life of heat and dust and labor? 
What did it all mean? 

The girl laid her chin on her strong red wrists, and looked up 
into the blue spaces between the vast clouds — aerial mountains 
dissolving in a shoreless azure sea. How cool and sweet and rest- 
ful they looked ! If she might only lie out on the billowy, snow- 
white, sunlit edge ! The voices of the driver and the ploughman 
recalled her, and she fixed her eyes again upon the slowly nodding 
head of the patient horse, on the boy turned half about on his 
saddle, talking to the white-sleeved man, whose derby hat bobbed 
up and down quite curiously, like the horse's head. Would she 
ask him to dinner ? What would her people say ? 



96 AMONG THE CORN-ROWS 

" Phew ! it's hot ! " was the greeting the young fellow gave as 
he came up. He smiled in a frank, boyish way, as he hung his 
hat on the top of a stake and looked up at her. " D' y' know, I 
kind o' enjoy gettin' at it again? Fact. It ain't no work for a 
girl, though," he added. 

"When 'd you get back?" she asked, the flush not yet out of 
her face. Rob was looking at her thick, fine hair and full Scan- 
dinavian face, rich as a rose in color, and did not reply for a few 
seconds. She stood with her hideous sun-bonnet pushed back on 
her shoulders. A kingbird was chattering overhead. 

" Oh, a few days ago." 

" How long y' goin' t' stay? " 

" Oh, I d' know. A week, mebbe." 

A far-off halloo came pulsing across the shimmering air. The 
boy screamed " Dinner ! " and waved his hat with an answering 
whoop, then flopped off the horse like a turtle off a stone into 
water. He had the horse unhooked in an instant, and had flung 
his toes up over the horse's back, in act to climb on, when Rob 
said : 

" H'yare, young feller ! wait a minute. Tired? " he asked the 
girl, with a tone that was more than kindly. It was almost 
tender. 

" Yes," she replied, in a low voice. " My shoes hurt me." 

"Well, here y' go," he replied, taking his stand by the horse, 
and holding out his hand like a step. She colored and smiled a 
little as she lifted her foot into his huge, hard, sunburned hand. 

" Oop-a-daisy ! " he called. She gave a spring, and sat on the 
horse like one at home there. 

Rob had a deliciously unconscious, abstracted, business-like air. 
He really left her nothing to do but enjoy his company, while he 
went ahead and did precisely as he pleased. 

"We don't raise much corn out there, an' so I kind o' like to 
see it once more." 

" I wish I didn't have to see another hill of corn as long as I 
live ! " replied the girl, bitterly. 

" Don't know as I blame yeh a bit. But, all the same, I'm glad 
you was working in it to-day," he thought to himself, as he walked 
beside her horse toward the house. 



HAMLIN GARLAND 97 

" Will you stop to dinner? " she inquired bluntly, almost surlily. 
It was evident there were reasons why she didn't mean to press 
him to do so. 

" You bet I will," he replied ; " that is, if you want I should." 

" You know how we live," she replied evasively. " If you can 
stand it, why — " She broke off abruptly. 

Yes, he remembered how they lived in that big, square, dirty, 
white frame house. It had been three or four years since he had 
been in it, but the smell of the cabbage and onions, the penetrat- 
ing, peculiar mixture of odors, assailed his memory as something 
unforgettable. 

" I guess I'll stop," he said, as she hesitated. She said no more, 
but tried to act as if she were not in any way responsible for what 
came afterward. 

" I guess I c'n stand f'r one meal what you stand all the while," 
he added. 

As she left them at the well and went to the house, he saw her 
limp painfully, and the memory of her face so close to his lips as 
he helped her down from the horse gave him pleasure at the same 
time that he was touched by its tired and gloomy look. Mrs. 
Peterson came to the door of the kitchen, looking just the same 
as ever. Broad-faced, unwieldy, flabby, apparently wearing the 
same dress he remembered to have seen her in years before, — a 
dirty, drab-colored thing, — she looked as shapeless as a sack of 
wool. Her English was limited to, " How de do, Rob? " 

He washed at the pump, while the girl, in the attempt to be 
hospitable, held the clean towel for him. 

" You're purty well used up, eh ? " he said to her. 

"Yes; it's awful hot out there." 

" Can't you lay off this afternoon? It ain't right." 

" No. He won't listen to that." 

" Well, let me take your place." 

" No ; there ain't any use o' that." 

Peterson, a brawny, wide-bearded Norwegian, came up at this 
moment, and spoke to Rob in a sullen, gruff way, 

" Hallo, whan yo' gaet back? " 

"To-day. He ain't vetj glad to see me," said Rob, winking at 
Julia. " He ain't b'ilin' over with enthusiasm ; but I c'n stand it, 

H 



98 AMONG THE CORN-ROWS 

for your sake," he added, with amazing assurance ; but the girl had 
turned away, and it was wasted. 

At the table he ate heartily of the " bean swaagen," which filled 
a large wooden bowl in the centre of the table, and which was 
ladled into smaller wooden bowls at . each plate. Juha had tried 
hard to convert her mother to Yankee ways, and had at last given 
it up in despair. Rob kept on safe subjects, mainly asking ques- 
tions about the crops of Peterson, and when addressing the girl, 
inquired of the schoolmates. By skilful questioning, he kept the 
subject of marriage uppermost, and seemingly was getting an 
inventory of the girls not yet married or engaged. 

It was embarrassing for the girl. She was all too well aware of 
the difference between her home and the home of her schoolmates 
and friends. She knew that it was not pleasant for her " Yankee " 
friends to come to visit her when they could not feel sure of a 
welcome from the tireless, silent, and grim-visaged old Norse, if, 
indeed, they could escape insult. Julia ate her food mechanically, 
and it could hardly be said that she enjoyed the brisk talk of the 
young man, his eyes were upon her so constantly and his smile 
so obviously addressed to her. She rose as soon as possible and, 
going outside, took a seat on a chair under the trees in the yard. 
She was not a coarse or dull girl. In fact, she had developed so 
rapidly by contact with the young people of the neighborhood, 
that she no longer found pleasure in her own home. She didn't 
believe in keeping up the old-fashioned Norwegian customs, and 
her life with her mother was not one to breed love or confidence. 
She was more like a hired hand. The love of the mother for her 
" Yulyie " was sincere though rough and inarticulate, and it was her 
jealousy of the young " Yankees " that widened the chasm between 
the girl and herself — an inevitable result. 

Rob followed the girl out into the yard, and threw himself on 
the grass at her feet, perfectly unconscious of the fact that this 
attitude was exceedingly graceful and becoming to them both. 
He did it because he wanted to talk to her, and the grass was 
cool and easy ; there wasn't any other chair, anyway. 

" Do they keep up the ly-ceum and the sociables same as 
ever?" 

" Yes. The others go a good 'eal, but I don't. We're gettin' 



HAMLIN GARLAND 



99 



such a stock round us, and father thinks he needs me s' much, I 
don't get out often. I'm gettin' sick of it." 

" I sh'd think y' would," he repHed, his eyes on her face. 

" I c'd stand the churnin' and housework, but when it comes t' 
workin' outdoors in the dirt an' hot sun, gettin' all sunburned and 
chapped up, it's another thing. An' then it seems as if he gets 
stingier 'n' stingier every year. I ain't had a new dress in — I 
d'-know-how-long. He says it's all nonsense, an' mother's just 
about as bad. Ske don't want a new dress, an' so she thinks I 
don't." The girl was feeling the influence of a sympathetic hs- 
tener and was making up for the long silence. " I've tried t' go 
out t' work, but they won't let me. They'd have t' pay a hand 
twenty dollars a month f r the work I do, an' they like cheap help ; 
but I'm not goin' t' stand it much longer, I can tell you that." 

Rob thought she was very handsome as she sat there with her 
eyes iixed on the horizon, while these rebellious thoughts found 
utterance in her quivering, passionate voice. 

" Yulie ! Kom haar ! " roared the old man from the well. 

A frown of anger and pain came into her face. She looked at 
Rob. " That means more work." 

" Say ! let me go out in your place. Come, now ; what's the 
use — " 

" No ; it wouldn't do no good. It ain't t'-day s' much ; it's 
every day, and — " 

" X\xlie ! " called Peterson again, with a string of impatient 
Norwegian. " Batter yo' kom pooty hal quick." 

"Well, all right, only I'd like to — " Rob submitted. 

" Well, good-by," she said, with a Httle touch of feeling. 
"When d' ye go back?" 

" I don't know. I'll see y' again before I go. Good-by." 

He stood watching her slow, painful pace till she reached the 
well, where Otto was standing with the horse. He stood watch- 
ing them as they moved out into the road and turned down 
toward the field. He felt that she had sent him away; but still 
there was a look in her eyes which was not altogether — 

He gave it up in despair at last. He was not good at analyses 
of this nature ; he was used to plain, blunt expressions. There 
was a woman's subtlety here quite beyond his reach. 

:L.ofC. 



100 AMONG THE CORN-ROWS 

He sauntered slowly off up the road after his talk with Julia. 
His head was low on his breast ; he was thinking as one who is 
about to take a decided and important step. 

He stopped at length, and, turning, watched the girl moving 
along in the deeps of the corn. Hardly a leaf was stirring ; the 
untempered sunlight fell in a burning flood upon the field ; the 
grasshoppers rose, snapped, buzzed, and fell ; the locust uttered 
its dry, heat-intensifying cry. The man lifted his head. 

" It's a d — n shame ! " he said, beginning rapidly to retrace his 
steps. He stood leaning on the fence, awaiting the girl's coming 
very much as she had waited his on the round he had made before 
dinner. He grew impatient at the slow gait of the horse, and 
drummed on the rail while he whistled. Then he took off his hat 
and dusted it nervously. As the horse got a little nearer he 
wiped his face carefully, pushed his hat back on his head, and 
climbed over the fence, where he stood with elbows on the middle 
rail as the girl and boy and horse came to the end of the furrow. 

" Hot, ain't it? " he said, as she looked up. 

"Jimminy Peters, it's awful!" puffed the boy. The girl did 
not reply till she swung the plough about after the horse, and set 
it upright into the next row. Her powerful body had a superb 
swaying motion at the waist as she did this — a motion which 
affected Rob vaguely but massively. 

" I thought you'd gone," she said gravely, pushing back her 
bonnet till he could see her face dewed with sweat, and pink as a 
rose. She had the high cheek-bones of her race, but she had also 
their exquisite fairness of color. 

"Say, Otto," asked Rob, alluringly, "wan' to go swimmin'?" 

"You bet," rephed Otto. 

" Well, I'll go a round if— " 

The boy dropped off the horse, not waiting to hear any more. 
Rob grinned, but the girl dropped her eyes, then looked away. 

" Go't rid o' him mighty quick. Say, Julyie, I hate like thunder 
t' see you out here ; it ain't right. I wish you'd — I wish — " 

She could not look at him now, and her bosom rose and fell 
with a motion that was not due to fatigue. Her moist hair matted 
around her forehead gave her a boyish look. 

Rob nervously tried again, tearing splinters from the fence. 



HAMLIN GARLAND lOI 

"Say, now, I'll tell yeh what I came back here for — t' git 
married ; and if you're willin', I'll do it to-night. Come, now, 
whaddy y' say? " 

"What've /got t' do 'bout it?" she finally asked, the color 
flooding her face, and a faint smile coming to her lips. " Go 
ahead. I ain't got anything — " 

Rob put a splinter in his mouth and faced her. " Oh, looky 
here, now, Julyie ! you know what I mean. I've got a good claim 
out near Boomtown — a rattlin' good claim ; a shanty on it four- 
teen by sixteen — no tarred paper about it, and a suUer to keep 
butter in, and a hundred acres o' wheat just about ready to turn 
now. I need a wife." 

Here he straightened up, threw away the splinter, and took off 
his hat. He was a very pleasant figure as the girl stole a look at 
him. His black laughing eyes were especially earnest just now. 
His voice had a touch of pleading. The popple tree over their 
heads murmured applause at his eloquence, then hushed to listen. 
A cloud dropped a silent shadow down upon them, and it sent a 
little thrill of fear through Rob, as if it were an omen of failure. 
As the girl remained silent, looking away, he began, man-fashion, 
to desire her more and more, as he feared to lose her. He put 
his hat on the post again and took out his jack-knife. Her calico 
dress draped her supple and powerful figure simply but naturally. 
The stoop in her shoulders, given by labor, disappeared as she 
partly leaned upon the fence. The curves of her muscular arms 
showed through her sleeve. 

" It's all-fired lonesome f'r me out there on that claim, and it 
ain't no picnic f'r you here. Now, if you'll come out there with 
me, you needn't do anything but cook f r me, and after harvest 
we can git a good layout o' furniture, an' I'll lath and plaster the 
house and put a little hell [ell] in the rear." He smiled, and so 
did she. He felt encouraged to say : " An' there we be, as snug 
as y' please. We're close t' Boomtown, an' we can go down there 
to church sociables an' things, and they're a jolly lot there." 

The girl was still silent, but the man's simple enthusiasm came 
to her charged with passion and a sort of romance such as her 
hard Ufe had known little of. There was something enticing about 
this trip to the West. 



102 AMONG THE CORN-ROWS 

" What'U my folks say? " she said at last. 

A virtual surrender, but Rob was not acute enough to see it. 
He pressed on eagerly : 

" I don't care. Do you? They'll jest keep y' ploughin' corn 
and milkin' cows till the day of judgment. Come, Julyie, I ain't 
got no time to fool away. I've got t' get back t' that grain. It's 
a whoopin' old crop, sure's y'r born, an' that means sompin' purty 
scrumptious in furniture this fall. Come, now." He approached 
her and laid his hand on her shoulder very much as he would have 
touched Albert Seagraves or any other comrade. " Whaddy y' 
say?" 

She neither started nor shrunk nor looked at him. She simply 
moved a step away. " They'd never let me go," she replied bit- 
terly. " I'm too cheap a hand. I do a man's work an' get no 
pay at all." 

" You'll have half o' all I c'n make," he put in. 

" How long c'n you wait ? " she asked, looking down at her 
dress. 

" Just two minutes," he said, pulling out his watch. " It ain't 
no use t' wait. The old man'U be jest as mad a week from now 
as he is to-day. Why not go now?" 

" I'm of age in a few days," she mused, wavering, calculating. 

" You c'n be of age to-night if you'll jest call on old Squire 
Hatfield with me." 

" All right, Rob," the girl said, turning and holding out her hand. 

"That's the talk!" he exclaimed, seizing it. "And now a 
kiss, to bind the bargain, as the fellah says." 

" I guess we c'n get along without that." 

" No, we can't. It won't seem Hke an engagement without it." 

" It ain't goin' to seem much like one, anyway," she answered, 
with a sudden realization of how far from her dreams of courtship 
this reality was. 

" Say, now, Julyie, that ain't fair ; it ain't treatin' me right. 
You don't seem to understand that I like you, but I do." 

Rob was carried quite out of himself by the time, the place, 
and the girl. He had said a very moving thing. 

The tears sprang involuntarily to the girl's eyes. " Do you 
mean it? If y' do, you may." 



HAMLIN GARLAND IO3 

She was trembling with emotion for the first time. The sin- 
cerity of the man's voice had gone deep. 

He put his arm around her ahnost timidly, and kissed her on 
the cheek, a great love for her springing up in his heart. " That 
settles it," he said. " Don't cry, Julyie. You'll never be sorry 
for it. Don't cry. It kind o' hurts me to see it," 

He hardly understood her feelings. He was only aware that 
she was crying, and tried in a bungling way to soothe her. But 
now that she had given way, she sat down in the grass and wept 
bitterly. 

"Yti/yieJ^^ yelled the vigilant old Norwegian, like a distant 
foghorn. 

The girl sprang up ; the habit of obedience was strong. 

" No ; you set right there, and I'll go round," he said. "Ofto ! " 

The boy came scrambling out of the wood, half dressed. Rob 
tossed him upon the horse, snatched Julia's sun-bonnet, put his 
own hat on her head, and moved off down the corn-rows, leaving 
the girl smiling through her tears as he whistled and chirped 
to the horse. Farmer Peterson, seeing the familiar sun-bonnet 
above the corn-rows, went back to his work, with a sentence of 
Norwegian trailing after him like the tail of a kite — something 
about lazy girls who didn't earn the crust of their bread, etc. 

Rob was wild with delight. " Git up there. Jack ! Hay, you 
old corncrib ! Say, Otto, can you keep your mouth shet if it puts 
money in your pocket? " 

" Jest try me 'n' see," said the keen-eyed little scamp. 

" Well, you keep quiet about my bein' here this afternoon, and 
I'll put a dollar on y'r tongue — hay ? — what ? — understand ? " 

" Show me y'r dollar," said the boy, turning about and showing 
his tongue. 

" All right. Begin to practise now by not talkin' to me." 

Rob went over the whole situation on his way back, and when 
he got in sight of the girl his plan was made. She stood waiting 
for him with a new look on her face. Her sullenness had given 
way to a peculiar eagerness and anxiety to believe in him. She 
was already living that free life in a far-off, wonderful country. No 
more would her stern father and sullen mother force her to tasks 
which she hated. She'd be a member of a new firm. She'd 



I04 AMONG THE CORN-ROWS 

work, of course, but it would be because she wanted to, and not 
because she was forced to. The independence and the love 
promised grew more and more attractive. She laughed back with 
a softer light in her eyes, when she saw the smiling face of Rob 
looking at her from her sun-bonnet. 

"Now you mustn't do any more o' this," he said. "You go 
back to the house an' tell y'r mother you're too lame to plough 
any more to-day, and it's gettin' late, anyhow. To-night ! " he 
whispered quickly. " Eleven ! Here ! " 

The girl's heart leaped with fear. " I'm afraid." 

" Not of me, are yeh?" 

" No, I'm not afraid of you, Rob." 

" I'm glad o' that. I — I want you — to like me, Julyie ; won't 
you? " 

" I'll try," she answered, with a smile. 

"To-night, then," he said, as she moved away. 

" To-night. Good-by." 

" Good-by." 

He stood and watched her till her tall figure was lost among 
the drooping corn-leaves. There was a singular choking feeling 
in his throat. The girl's voice and face had brought up so many 
memories of parties and picnics and excursions on far-off holidays, 
and at the same time held suggestions of the future. He already 
felt that it was going to be an unconscionably long time before 
eleven o'clock. 

He saw her go to the house, and then he turned and walked 
slowly up the dusty road. Out of the May-weed the grasshoppers 
sprang, buzzing and snapping their dull red wings. Butterflies, 
yellow and white, fluttered around moist places in the ditch, and 
slender, striped water-snakes glided across the stagnant pools at 
sound of footsteps. 

But the mind of the man was far away on his claim, building a 
new house, with a woman's advice and presence. 

It was a windless night. The katydids and an occasional cricket 
were the only sounds Rob could hear as he stood beside his team 
and strained his ear to listen. At l6ng intervals a little breeze 
ran through the corn like a swift serpent, bringing to his nostrils 



HAMLIN GARLAND 



105 



the sappy smell of the growing corn. The horses stamped un- 
easily as the mosquitoes settled on their shining limbs. The sky 
was full of stars, but there was no moon. 

" What if she don't come ? " he thought. " Or cati't come ? I 
can't stand that. I'll go to the old man an' say, ' Looky here — ' 
Sh!" 

He listened again. There was a rustling in the corn. It was 
not like the fitful movement of the wind ; it was steady, slower, 
and approaching. It ceased. He whistled the wailing sweet cry 
of the prairie-chicken. Then a figure came out into the road — 
a woman — Julia ! 

He took her in his arms as she came panting up to him. 

" Rob ! " 

"Julyie!" 

A few words, the dull tread of swift horses, the rising of a silent 
train of dust, and then — the wind wandered in the growing corn, 
the dust fell, a dog barked down the road, and the katydids sang 
to the liquid contralto of the river in its shallows. 



THE LAD IN THE HEMP-FIELD 

JAMES LANE ALLEN 
[From The Reign of Law, 1900.] 

Some sixty-five years later, one hot day of midsummer in 1865 
— one Saturday afternoon — a lad was cutting weeds in a wood- 
land pasture ; a big, raw-boned, demure boy of near eighteen. 

He had on heavy shoes, the toes green with grass stain ; the 
leather so seasoned by morning dews as to be like wood for hard- 
ness. These were to keep his feet protected from briers or from 
the bees scattered upon the wild white clover or from the terrible 
hidden thorns of the honey-locust. No socks. A pair of scant 
homespun trousers, long outgrown. A coarse clean shirt. His big 
shock-head thatched with yellow straw, a dilapidated sun-and-rain 
shed. 



I06 THE LAD IN THE HEMP-FIELD 

The lanky young giant cut and cut and cut : great purple-bodied 
poke, strung v.'ith crimson-juiced seed ; great burdock, its green 
burrs a plague ; great milkweed, its creamy sap gushing at every 
gash ; great thistles, thousand-nettled ; great ironweed, plumed 
with royal purple ; now and then a straggling bramble prone with 
velvety berries — the outpost of a patch behind him ; now and 
then — more carefully, lest he notch his blade — low sprouts of 
wild cane, survivals of the impenetrable brakes of pioneer days. 
All these and more, the rank, mighty measure of the soil's fertility 

— low down. 

Measure of its fertility aloft, the tops of the trees, from which 
the call of the red-headed woodpecker sounded as faint as the 
memory of a sound and the bark of the squirrels was elfin-thin. 
A hot crowded land, crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth 
wherever a woodland stood ; and around every woodland dense 
corn-fields ; or, denser still, the leagues of swaying hemp. The 
smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming to be dragged 
hither and thither like a slow scum on the breeze, like a moss on 
a sluggish pond. A deep robust land ; and among its growths he 

— this lad, in his way a self-unconscious human weed, the seed of 
his kind borne in from far some generations back, but springing 
out of the soil naturally now, sap of its sap, strength of its strength. 

He paused by and by and passed his forefinger across his fore- 
head, brushing the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He 
moistened the tip of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his 
hemp hook — he was using that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he 
walked back to the edge of the brier thicket, sat down in the 
shade of a black walnut, threw off his tattered head-gear, and, 
reaching for his bucket of water covered with poke leaves, lifted 
it to his lips and drank deeply, gratefully. Then he drew a whet- 
stone from his pocket, spat on it, and fell to sharpening his blade. 

The heat of his work, the stifling air, the many-toned woods, 
the sense of the vast summering land — these things were not in 
his thoughts. Some days before, despatched from homestead to 
homestead, rumors had reached him away off here at work on his 
father's farm, of a great university to be opened the following 
autumn at Lexington. The like of it with its many colleges Ken- 
tucky, the South, the Mississippi valley, had never seen. It had 



JAMES' LANE ALLEM I07 

been the talk among the farming people in their harvest fields, at 
the cross-roads, on their porches — the one deep sensation among 
them since the war. 

For solemn, heart-stirring as such tidings would have been at 
any other time, more so at this. Here, on the tableland of this 
unique border state, Kentucky — between the halves of the nation 
lately at strife — scene of their advancing and retreating armies — 
pit of a frenzied commonwealth — here was to arise this calm 
university, pledge of the new times, plea for the peace and amity 
of learning, fresh chance for study of the revelation of the Lord 
of Hosts and God of battles. The animosities were over, the 
humanities rebegun. 

Can you remember your youth well enough to be able to recall 
the time when the great things happened for which you seemed 
to be waiting? The boy who is to be a soldier — one day he 
hears a distant bugle : at once he knows. A second glimpses a 
bellying sail : straightway the ocean path beckons to him. A 
third discovers a college, and toward its kindly lamps of learn- 
ing turns young eyes that have been kindled and will stay kindled 
to the end. 

For some years this particular lad, this obscure item in Nature's 
plan which always passes understanding, had been growing more 
unhappy in his place in creation. By temperament he was of a 
type the most joyous and self-rehant — those sure signs of health ; 
and discontent now was due to the fact that he had outgrown his 
place. Parentage — a farm and its tasks — a country neighbor- 
hood and its narrowness — what more are these sometimes than 
a starting-point for a young life ; as a flower-pot might serve to 
sprout an oak, and as the oak would inevitably reach the hour 
when it would either die or burst out, root and branch, into the 
whole heavens and the earth ; as the shell and yolk of an egg are 
the starting-point for the wing and eye of the eagle. One thing 
only he had not outgrown, in one thing only he was not unhappy : 
his religious nature. This had always been in him as breath was 
in him, as blood was in him : it was his hfe. Dissatisfied now 
with his position in the world, it was this alone that kept him 
contented in himself. Often the religious are the weary ; and 
perhaps nowhere else does a perpetual vision of Heaven so 



108 THE MIRACLE OF THE PEACH TREE 

disclose itself to the weary as above lonely toiling fields. The lad 
had long been lifting his inner eye to this vision. 

When, therefore, the tidings of the university with its Bible 
College reached him, whose outward mould was hardship, whose 
inner bliss was piety, at once they fitted his ear as the right 
sound, as the gladness of long-awaited intelligence. It was bugle 
to the soldier, sail to the sailor, lamp of learning to the innate 
student. At once he knew that he was going to the university — 
sometime, somehow — and from that moment felt no more discon- 
tent, void, restlessness, nor longing. 

It was of this university, then, that he was happily day-dream- 
ing as he whetted his hemp hook in the depths of the woods that 
Saturday afternoon. Sitting low amid heat and weeds and thorns, 
he was already as one who had climbed above the earth's eternal 
snow-hne and sees only white peaks and pinnacles — the last 
sublimities. 

He felt impatient for to-morrow. One of the professors of the 
university, of the faculty of the Bible College, had been travelling 
over the statq, during the summer, pleading its cause before the 
people. He had come into that neighborhood to preach and 
to plead. The lad would be there to hear. 

The church in which the professor was to plead for learning 
and religion was the one first set up in the Kentucky wilderness 
as a house of religious liberty ; and the lad was a great-grandchild 
of the founder of that church, here emerging mysteriously from 
the deeps of hfe four generations down the line. 

THE MIRACLE OF THE PEACH TREE 

MAURICE HEWLETT 

[From " Madonna of the Peach Tree," in Little Novels of Italy, 1899. Gio- 
vanna Scarpa of Verona has been slandered and ahnost mobbed in the absence 
of her husband, and has fled from the city with her baby in her arms.] 

Directly you were outside the Porta San Zeno the peach trees 
began — acre by acre of bent trunks, whose long branches, tied 
at the top, took shapes of blown candle-flames : beyond these 
was an open waste of bents and juniper scrub, which afforded 
certain eatage for goats. 



MAURICE HEWLETT 109 

Here three herd-boys, Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, simple brown- 
skinned souls, watched their flocks all the summer night, sleeping, 
waking to play pranks on each other, whining endless doggerel, 
praying at every scare, and swearing at every reassurance. Sim- 
ple, puppyish folk though they were. Madonna of the Peach Tree 
chose them to witness her epiphany. 

It was a very still night, of wonderful star-shine, but without 
a moon. The stars were so thickly spread, §0 clear and hot, that 
there was light enough for the lads to see each other's faces, the 
rough shapes of each other. It was light enough to notice how 
the square belfry of San Zeno cut a wedge of black into the span- 
gled blue vault. Sheer through the Milky Way it ploughed a 
broad furrow, which ended in a ragged edge. You would never 
have seen that if it had not been a clear night. 

Still also it was. You heard the cropping of the goats, the 
jaws' champ when they chewed the crisp leaves \ the flicker of 
the bats' wings. In the marsh, half a mile away, the chorus 
of frogs, when it swelled up, drowned all nearer noise ; but when 
it broke off suddenly, those others resumed their hold upon the 
stillness. It was a breathless night of suspense. Anything might 
happen on such a night. 

Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, under the spell of this marvellous 
night, lay on their stomachs alert for alarms. A heavy-wheeling, 
white owl had come by with a swish, and Biagio had called aloud 
to Madonna in his agony. Astorre had crossed himself over and 
over again : this was the Angel of Death cruising abroad on the 
hunt for goats or goat-herds ; but " No, no ! " cried Luca, eldest 
of the three, " the wings are too short, friends. That is a fluffy 
new soul just let loose. She knows not the way, you see. Let us 
pray for her. There are devils abroad on such close nights as 
this." 

Pray they did, with a will, " Ave Maria," " O maris Stella," and 
half the Paternoster, when Biagio burst into a guffaw, and gave 
Luca a push which sent Astorre down. 

"Why, 'tis only a screech-owl, you fools!" he cried, though 
the sound of his own voice made him falter ; " an old mouse- 
teaser," he went on in a much lower voice. " Who's afraid ? " 

A black and white cat making a pounce had sent hearts to 



no THE MIRACLE OF THE PEACH TREE 

mouths after this : though they found her out before they had got 
to " Dominus tecum," she left them all in a quiver. It had been 
a cat, but it might have been the devil. Then, before the bristles 
had folded down on their backs, they rose up again, and the hair 
of their heads became rigid as quills. Over the brow of a little 
hill, through the peach trees (which bowed their spiry heads to 
her as she walked), came quietly a tall white Lady in a dark 
cloak. Hey ! powers of earth and air, but this was not to be 
doubted ! Evenly forward she came, without a footfall, without 
a rustle or the crackling of a twig, without so much as kneeing 
her skirt — stood before them so nearly that they saw the pale 
oval of her face, and said in a voice like a muffled bell, " I am 
hungry, my friends ; have you any meat ? " She had a face like 
the moon, and great round eyes ; within her cloak, on the bosom 
of her white dress, she held a man-child. He, they passed their 
sacred word, lifted in his mother's arms and turned open-handed 
towards them. Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, goat-herds all and 
honest lads, fell on their faces with one accord ; with one voice 
they cried, " Madonna, Madonna, Madonna ! pray for us sinners ! " 

But again the Lady spoke in her gentle tones. " I am very 
hungry, and my child is hungry. Have you nothing to give me? " 
So then Luca kicked the prone Biagio, and Biagio's heel nicked 
Astorre on the shin. But it was Luca, as became the eldest, who 
got up first, all the same ; and as soon as he was on his feet the 
others followed him. Luca took his cap off, Biagio saw the act 
and followed it. Astorre, who dared not lift his eyes, and was so 
busy making crosses on himself that he had no hands to spare, 
kept his on till Luca nudged Biagio, and Biagio cuffed him soundly, 
saying, " Uncover, cow-face." 

Then Luca on his knees made an offering of cheese and black 
bread to the Lady. They saw the gleam of her white hand as she 
stretched it out to take the victual. That hand shone like agate 
in the d^rk. They saw her eat, sitting very straight and noble upon 
a tussock of bents. Astorre whispered to Biagio, Biagio consulted 
with Luca for a few anxious moments, and communicated again 
with Astorre. Astorre jumped up and scuttled away into the 
dark. Presently he came back, bearing something in his two 
hands, The three shock-head^ inspected his burden j there was 



MA URICE HE IVLETT I 1 1 

much whispering, some contention, ahuost a scuffle. The truth 
was, that Biagio wanted to take the thing from Astorre, and that 
Luca would not allow it. Luca was the eldest, and wanted to take 
it himself. Astorre was in tears. " Cristo amore!''^ he blub- 
bered, " you will spill the milk between you. I thought of it all 
by myself. Let go, Biagio ; let go, Luca ! " So they whispered 
and tussled, pulling three different ways. The Lady's voice broke 
over them like silver rain. " Let him who thought of the kind act 
give me the milk," she said ; so young Astorre on his knees handed 
her the horn cup, and through the cracks of his fingers watched 
her drink every drop. 

That done, the cup returned with a smile piercingly sweet, the 
Lady rose. Saints on thrones, how tall she was ! " The bimbo ^ 
will thank you for this to-morrow, as I do now," said she. "Good 
night, my friends, and may the good God have mercy upon all 
souls ! " She turned to go the way she had come, but Astorre, 
covering his eyes with one hand, crept forward on three legs (as 
you might say) and plucked the hem of her robe up, and kissed 
it. She stooped to lay a hand upon his head. " Never kiss my 
robe, Astorre," said she — and how under Heaven did she know 
his name if she were not tvhai she was ? — " Never kiss my robe, 
but get up and let me kiss you." Well of Truth ! to think of it ! 
Up gets Astorre, shaking like a nun in a fit, a;nd the Lady bent 
over him and, as sure as you are you, kissed his forehead. Astorre 
told his village next day as they sat round him in a ring, and he 
on the well-head as plain to be seen as this paper, that he felt at 
that moment as if two rose leaves had dropped from heaven upon 
his forehead. Slowly, then, very slowly and smoothly (as they 
report), did the Lady move away towards the peach trees whence 
she had come. In the half light there was — for by this it was the 
hour before dawn — they saw her take a peach from one of the 
trees. She stayed to eat it. Then she walked over the crest 
of the orchard and disappeared. As soon as they dared, when 
the light had come, they looked for her over that same crest, but 
could see nothing whatever. With pale, serious faces the three 
youths regarded each other. There was no doubt as to what had 
happened — a miracle ! a miracle ! 

1 [For the love of Christ.] 2 [Baby.] 



112 THE MIRACLE OF THE PEACH TREE 

With one consent then — smce this was plainly a Church affair 

— they ran to their parish priest, Don Gasparo. He got the whole 
story at last ; nothing could shake them ; no detail was wanting. 
Thus it was : the Blessed Virgin, carrying in her arms the Santis- 
simo Bambino Gesu,^ had come through the peach trees, asked 
for and eaten of their food, prayed for them aloud to Messer 
Domeneddio - himself, and kissed Astorre on the forehead. As 
they were on their knees, she walked away, stopped, took a peach, 
ate it, walked on, vanished — ecco / ^ — The curate rubbed his head, 
and tried another boy. Useless : the story was the same. Third 
boy, same story. He tucked up his cassock with decision, took 
his biretta and walking-staff, and said to the three goat-herds — 

" My lads, all this is matter of miracle. I do not deny its truth 

— God forbid it in a simple man such as I am. But I do cer- 
tainly ask you to lead me to the scene of your labors." 

The boys needed no second asking : off they all set. The curate 
went over every inch of the ground. Here lay Luca, Biagio, and 
Astorre ; the belfry of San Zeno was in such and such a direction, 
the peach trees in such and such. Good : there they were. What 
next? According to their account. Madonna had come thus and 
thus. The good curate bundled off to spy for footprints in the 
orchard. Marvel ! there were none. This made him look very 
grave ; for if she made no earthly footprints, she could have no 
earthly feet. Next he must see by what way she had gone. She 
left them kneeling here, said they, went towards the peach garden, 
stayed by a certain tree (which they pointed out), plucked a peach 
from the very top of it — this they swore to, though the tree was 
near fourteen feet high — stood while she ate it, and went over the 
brow of the rising ground. Here was detail enough, it is to be 
hoped. The curate nosed it out like a slot-hound ; he paced the 
track himself from the scrub to the peach tree, and stood under 
this last gazing to its top, from there to its roots ; he shook his 
head many times, stroked his chin a few : then with a broken cry 
he made a pounce and picked up — a peach stone ! After this 
to doubt would have been childish ; as a fact he had no more than 
the boys. 

" My children," said he, " we are here face to face with a great 

1 [The most holy child Jesus.] 2 [God.] 3 [Behold !] 



MAURICE HEWLETT II3 

mystery. It is plain that Messer Domeneddio hath designs upon 
this hamlet, of which we, His worms, have no conception. You, 
my dear sons. He hath chosen to be workers for His purpose, 
which we cannot be very far wrong in supposing to be the build- 
ing of an oratory or tabernacle to hold this unspeakable relic. 
That erection must be our immediate anxious care. Meantime I 
will place the relic in the pyx of our Lady's altar, and mark the 
day in our calendar for perpetual remembrance. I shall not fail 
to communicate with his holiness the bishop. Who knows what 
may be the end of this? " 

He was as good as his word. A procession was formed in no 
time — children carrying their rosaries and bunches of flowers, 
three banners, the whole village with a candle apiece ; next Luca, 
Biagio, and Astorre with larger candles — half a pound weight 
each at the least ; then four men to hold up a canopy, below 
which came the good curate himself with the rehc on a cushion. 

It was deposited with great reverence in the place devoted, hav- 
ing been drenched with incense. There was a solemn mass. After 
which things the curate thought himself at liberty to ruffle into 
Verona with his news. 



A DOG AND HIS MASTER 

JACK LONDON 
[From The Call of the Wild, 1903.] 

For a long time after his rescue, Buck did not like Thornton to 
get out of his sight. From the moment he left the tent to when 
he entered it again. Buck would follow at his heels. His transient 
masters since he had come into the Northland had bred in him 
a fear that no master could be permanent. He was afraid that 
Thornton would pass out of his life as Perrault and Francois and 
the Scotch half-breed had passed out. Even in the night, in his 
dreams, he was haunted by this fear. At such times he would 
shake off sleep and creep through the chill to the flap of the tent, 
where he would stand and listen to the sound of his master's 
breathing. 



114 ^ ^<^^ ^^^ ^^^^ MASTER 

But in spite of this great love he bore John Thornton, which 
seemed to bespeak the soft civihzing influence, the strain of the 
primitive, which the Northland had aroused in him, remained 
alive and active. Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire 
and roof, were his; yet he retained his wildness and wiliness. He 
was a thing of the wild, come in from the wild to sit by John 
Thornton's fire, rather than a dog of the soft Southland stamped 
with the marks of generations of civilization. Because of his very 
great love, he could not steal from this man, but from any other 
man, in any other camp, he did not hesitate an instant ; while 
the cunning with which he stole enabled him to escape detection. 

His face and body were scored by the teeth of many dogs, and 
he fought as fiercely as ever and more shrewdly. Skeet and Nig 
were too good-natured for quarrelling, — besides, they belonged to 
John Thornton ; but the strange dog, no matter what the breed 
or valor, swiftly acknowledged Buck's supremacy or found himself 
struggling for life with a terrible antagonist. And Buck was 
merciless. He had learned well the law of club and fang, and he 
never forewent an advantage or drew back from a foe he had 
started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from Spitz, and 
from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew 
there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; 
while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in 
the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such 
misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be 
eaten, was the law ; and this mandate, down out of the depths of 
Time, he obeyed. 

He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he 
had drawn. He linked the past with the present, and the eter- 
nity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which 
he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed. He sat by John 
Thornton's fire, a broad-breasted dog, white-fanged and long- 
furred ; but behind him were the shades of all manner of dogs, 
half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting, tasting the 
savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank, scenting 
the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the sounds 
made by the wild hfe in the forest, dictating his moods, directing 
his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down, and 



JACK LONDON II5 

dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the 
stuff of his dreams. 

So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day 
mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. 
Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard 
this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to 
turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and 
to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or 
why ; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperi- 
ously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained the soft 
unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton 
drew him back to the fire again. 

Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as nothing. 
Chance travellers might praise or pet him ; but he was cold under 
it all, and from a too demonstrative man he would get up and 
walk away. When Thornton's partners, Hans and Pete, arrived 
on the long-expected raft. Buck refused to notice them till he 
learned they were close to Thornton ; after that he tolerated them 
in a passive sort .of way, accepting favors from them as though he 
favored them by accepting. They were of the same large type as 
Thornton, living close to the earth, thinking simply and seeing 
clearly ; and ere they swung the raft into the big eddy by the saw- 
mill at Dawson, they understood Buck and his ways, and did not 
insist upon an intimacy such as obtained with Skeet and Nig. 

For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow. 
He, alone among men, could put a pack upon Buck's back in the 
summer travelling. Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when 
Thornton commanded. One day (they had grub-staked them- 
selves from the proceeds of the raft and left Dawson for the head- 
waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting on the 
crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock 
three hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the 
edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, 
and he drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the experiment he 
had in mind. " Jump, Buck ! " he commanded, sweeping his arm 
out and over the chasm. The next instant he was grappling with 
Buck on the extreme edge, while Hans and Pete were dragging 
them back into safety. 



Il6 A DOG AND HIS MASTER 

" It's uncanny," Pete said, after it was over and they caught 
their speech. 

Thornton shook his head. " No, it is splendid, and it is ter- 
rible, too. Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid." 

" I'm not hankering to be the man that lays hands on you while 
he's around," Pete announced conclusively, nodding his head 
toward Buck. 

" Py Jingo ! " was Hans's contribution. " Not mineself either." 

It was at Circle City, ere the year was out, that Pete's appre- 
hensions were realized. " Black " Burton, a man evil-tempered 
and malicious, had been picking a quarrel with a tenderfoot at 
the bar, when Thornton stepped good-naturedly between. Buck, 
as was his custom, was lying in a corner, head on paws, watch- 
ing his master's every action. Burton struck out, without warn- 
ing, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was sent spinning, 
and saved himself from falling only by clutching the rail of 
the bar. 

Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor 
yelp, but a something which is best described as a roar, and they 
saw Buck's body rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton's 
throat. The man saved his life by instinctively throwing out his 
arm, but was hurled backward to the floor with Buck on top of 
him. Buck loosed his teeth from the flesh of the arm and drove 
in again for the throat. This time the man succeeded only in 
partly blocking, and his throat was torn open. Then the crowd 
was upon Buck, and he was driven off; but while a surgeon 
checked the bleeding, he prowled up and down, growling furiously, 
attempting to rush in, and being forced back by an array of hostile 
clubs. A " miners' meeting," called on the spot, decided that the 
dog had sufficient provocation, and Buck was discharged. But 
his reputation was made, and from that day his name spread 
through every camp in Alaska. 

Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton's life 
in quite another fashion. The three partners were lining a long 
and narrow poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the Forty- 
Mile Creek. Hans and Pete moved along the bank, snubbing 
with a thin Manila rope from tree to tree, while Thornton remained 
in the boat helping its descent by means of a pole, and shouting. 



JACK LONDON II7 

directions to the shore. Buck, on the bank, worried and anxious, 
kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off his master. 

At a particularly bad spot, where a ledge of barely submerged 
rocks jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and, while 
Thornton poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank 
with the end in his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the 
ledge. This it did, and was flying down-stream in a current as 
swift as a mill-race, when Hans checked it with the rope and 
checked too suddenly. The boat flirted over and snubbed in to 
the bank bottom up, while Thornton, flung sheer out of it, was 
carried down- stream toward the worst part of the rapids, a stretch 
of wild water in which no swimmer could live. 

Buck had sprung in on the instant ; and at the end of three 
hundred yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled Thornton. 
When he felt him grasp his tail. Buck headed for the bank, swim- 
ming with all his splendid strength. But the progress shoreward 
was slow ; the progress down-stream amazingly rapid. From be- 
low came the fatal roaring where the wild current went wilder 
and was rent in shreds and spray by the rocks which thrust through 
like the teeth of an enormous comb. The suck of the water as it 
took the beginning of the last steep pitch was frightful, and Thorn- 
ton knew that the shore was impossible. He scraped furiously 
over a rock, bruised across a second, and struck a third with 
crushing force. He clutched its slippery top with both hands, 
releasing Buck, and above the roar of the churning water shouted : 
'' Go, Buck ! go ! " 

Buck could not hold his own, and swept on down-stream, 
struggling desperately, but unable to win back. When he heard 
Thornton's command repeated, he partly reared out of the water, 
throwing his head high, as though for a last look, then turned 
obediently toward the bank. He swam powerfully and was 
dragged ashore by Pete and Hans at the very point where swim- 
ming ceased to be possible and destruction began. 

They knew that the time a man could cling to a slippery rock 
in the face of that driving current was a matter of minutes, and they 
ran as fast as they could up the bank to a point far above where 
Thornton was hanging on. They attached the line with which 
they had been snubbing the boat to Buck's neck and shoulders, 



Il8 A DOG AND HIS MASTER 

being careful that it should neither strangle him nor impede his 
swimming, and launched him into the stream. He struck out 
boldly, but not straight enough into the stream. He discovered 
the mistake too late, when Thornton was abreast of him and a bare 
half-dozen strokes away while he was being carried helplessly past. 

Hans promptly snubbed with the rope, as though Buck were a 
boat. The rope thus tightening on him in the sweep of the cur- 
rent, he was jerked under the surface, and under the surface he 
remained till his body struck against the bank and he was hauled 
out. He was half drowned, and Hans and Pete threw themselves 
upon him, pounding the breath into him and the water out of him. 
He staggered to his feet and fell down. The faint sound of 
Thornton's voice came to them, and though they could not make 
out the words of it, they knew that he was in his extremity. His 
master's voice acted on Buck like an electric shock. He sprang 
to his feet and ran up the bank ahead of the men to the point of 
his previous departure. 

Again the rope was attached and he was launched, and again he 
struck out, but this time straight into the stream. He had mis- 
calculated once, but he would not be guilty of it a second time. 
Hans paid out the rope, permitting no slack, while Pete kept it 
clear of coils. Buck held on till he was on a line straight above 
Thornton ; then he turned, and with the speed of an express 
train headed down upon him. Thornton saw him Coming, and, as 
Buck struck him like a battering ram, with the whole force of the 
current behind him, he reached up and closed with both arms 
around the shaggy neck. Hans snubbed the rope around the 
tree, and Buck and Thornton were jerked under the water. 
Strangling, suffocating, sometimes one uppermost and sometimes 
the other, dragging over the jagged bottom, smashing against 
rocks and snags, they veered in to the bank. 

Thornton came to, belly downward and being violently propelled 
back' and forth across a drift log by Hans and Pete. His first 
glance was for Buck, over whose limp and apparently lifeless body 
Nig was setting up a howl, while Skeet was licking the wet face 
and closed eyes. Thornton was himself bruised and battered, and 
he went carefully over Buck's body, when he had been brought 
around, finding three broken ribs. 



JACK LONDON II9 

"That settles it," he announced. "We camp right here." 
And camp they did, till Buck's ribs knitted and he was able to travel. 

That winter, at Dawson, Buck performed another exploit, 
not so heroic, perhaps, but one that put his name many notches 
higher on the totem-pole of Alaskan fame. This exploit was par- 
ticularly gratifying to the three men ; for they stood in need of the 
outfit which it furnished, and were enabled to make a long-desired 
trip into the virgin East, where miners had not yet appeared. It 
was brought about by a conversation in the Eldorado Saloon, in 
which men waxed boastful of their favorite dogs. Buck, because 
of his record, was the target for these men, and Thornton was 
driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of half an hour one 
man stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred 
pounds and walk off with it ; a second bragged six hundred for his 
dog ; and a third, seven hundred. 

" Pooh ! pooh ! " said John Thornton ; " Buck can start a thou- 
sand pounds." 

"And break it out? and walk off with it for a hundred yards?" 
demanded Matthewson, a Bonanza King, he of the seven hundred 
vaunt. 

" And break it out, and walk off with it for a hundred yards," 
John Thornton said coolly. 

" Well," Matthewson said, slowly and deliberately, so that all 
could hear, " I've got a thousand dollars that says he can't. And 
there it is." So saying, he slammed a sack of gold dust of the 
size of a bologna sausage down upon the bar. 

Nobody spoke. Thornton's bluff, if bluff it was, had been 
called. He could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his 
face. His tongue had tricked him. He did not know whether 
Buck could start a thousand pounds. Half a ton ! The enor- 
mousness of it appalled him. He had great faith in Buck's 
strength and had often thought him capable of starting such a 
load; but never, as now, had he faced the possibility of it — the 
eyes of a dozen men fixed upon him, silent and waiting. Further, 
he had no thousand dollars ; nor had Hans or Pete. 

" I've got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fifty-pound 
sacks of flour on it," Matthewson went on with brutal directness ; 
" so don't let that hinder you." 



120 A DOG AND HIS MASTER 

Thornton did not reply. He did not know what to say. He 
glanced from face to face in the absent way of a man who has 
lost the power of thought and is seeking somewhere to find the 
thing that will start it going again. The face of Jim O'Brien, a 
Mastodon King and old-time comrade, caught his eyes. It was 
as a cue to him, seeming to rouse him to do what he would never 
have dreamed of doing. 

" Can you lend me a thousand? " he asked, almost in a whisper. 

" Sure," answered O'Brien, thumping down a plethoric sack by 
the side of Matthewson's. "Though it's little faith I'm having, 
John, that the beast can do the trick." 

The Eldorado emptied its occupants into the street to see the 
test. The tables were deserted, and the dealers and gamekeepers 
came forth to see the outcome of the wager and to lay odds. 
Several hundred men, furred and mittened, banked around the 
sled within easy distance. Matthewson's sled, loaded with a thou- 
sand pounds of flour, had been standing for a couple of hours, 
and in the intense cold (it was sixty below zero) the runners had 
frozen fast to the hard-packed snow. Men offered odds of two 
to one that Buck could not budge the sled. A quibble arose 
concerning the phrase " break out." O'Brien contended it was 
Thornton's privilege to knock the runners loose, leaving Buck to 
" break it out " from a dead standstill. Matthewson insisted that 
the phrase included breaking the runners from the frozen grip of 
the snow. A majority of the men who had witnessed the making 
of the bet decided in his favor, whereat the odds went up to three 
to one against Buck. 

There were no takers. Not a man believed him capable of the 
feat. Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with 
doubt ; and now that he looked at the sled itself, the concrete 
fact, with the regular team of ten dogs curled up in the snow 
before it, the more impossible the task appeared. Matthewson 
waxe4 jubilant. 

"Three to one ! " he proclaimed. " I'll lay you another thou- 
sand at that figure, Thornton. What d'ye say?" 

Thornton's doubt was strong in his face, but his fighting spirit 
was aroused — the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to 
recognize the impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for 



JACK LONDON 121 

battle. He called Hans and Pete to him. Their sacks were 
slim, and with his own the three partners could rake together only 
two hundred dollars. In the ebb of their fortunes, this sum was 
their total capital ; yet they laid it unhesitatingly against Matthew- 
son's six hundred. 

The team of ten dogs was unhitched, and Buck, with his own 
harness, was put into the sled. He had caught the contagion of 
the excitement, and he felt that in some way he must do a great 
thing for John Thornton. Murmurs of admiration at his splendid 
appearance went up. He was in perfect condition, without an 
ounce of superfluous flesh, and the one hundred and fifty pounds 
that he weighed were so many pounds of grit and virility. His 
furry coat shone with the sheen of silk. Down the neck and 
across the shoulders, his mane, in repose as it was, half bristled 
and seemed to lift with every movement, as though excess of 
vigor made each particular hair alive and active. The great 
breast and heavy fore legs were no more than in proportion with 
the rest of the body, where the muscles showed in tight rolls 
underneath the skin. Men felt these muscles and proclaimed 
them hard as iron, and the odds went down to two to one. 

" Gad, sir ! Gad, sir ! " stuttered a member of the latest dy- 
nasty, a king of the Skookum Benches. " I offer you eight hun- 
dred for him, sir, before the test, sir, eight hundred just as he 
stands." 

Thornton shook his head and stepped to Buck's side. 

" You must stand off from him," Matthewson protested. " Free 
play and plenty of room." 

The crowd fell silent ; only could be heard the voices of gam- 
blers vainly offering two to one. Everybody acknowledged Buck 
a magnificent animal, but twenty fifty-pound sacks of flour bulked 
too large in their eyes for them to loosen their pouch-strings. 

Thornton knelt down by Buck's side. He took his head in his 
two hands and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully 
shake him, as was his wont, or murmur soft love curses ; but he 
whispered in his ear. " As you love me. Buck. As you love me," 
was what he whispered. Buck whined with suppressed eagerness. 

The crowd was watching curiously. The affair was growing 
mysterious. It seemed like a conjuration. As Thornton got to 



122 A DOG AND HIS MASTER 

his feet, Buck seized his mittened hand between his jaws, pressing 
it with his teeth and releasing slowly, half reluctantly. It was the 
answer, in terms, not of speech, but of love. Thornton stepped 
well back. 

" Now, Buck," he said. 

Buck tightened the traces, then slackened them for a matter of 
several inches. It was the way he had learned. 

" Gee ! " Thornton's voice rang out, sharp in the tense silence. 

Buck swung to the right, ending the movement in a plunge that 
took up the slack and with a sudden jerk arrested his one hundred 
and fifty pounds. The load quivered, and from under the runners 
arose a crisp crackling, 

" Haw ! " Thornton commanded. 

Buck duplicated the manoeuvre, this time to the left. The 
crackling turned into a snapping, the sled pivoting and the 
runners slipping and grating several inches to the side. The sled 
was broken out. Men were holding their breaths, intensely un- 
conscious of the fact. 

" Now, MUSH ! " 

Thornton's command cracked out like a pistol shot. Buck 
threw himself forward, tightening the traces with a jarring lunge. 
His whole body was gathered compactly together in the tremen- 
dous effort, the muscles writhing and knotting like live things 
under the silky fur. His great chest was low to the ground, his 
head forward and down, while his feet were flying like mad, the 
claws scarring the hard-packed snow in parallel grooves. The sled 
swayed and trembled, half started forward. One of iiis feet slipped, 
and one man groaned aloud. Then the sled lurched ahead 
in what appeared a rapid succession of jerks, though it really 
never came to a dead stop again — half an inch — an inch — two 
inches — the jerks perceptibly diminished ; as the sled gained 
momentum, he caught them up, till it was moving steadily along. 

Men' gasped and began to breathe again, unaware that for a 
moment they had ceased to breathe. Thornton was running be- 
hind, encouraging Buck with short, cheery words. The distance 
had been measured off, and as he neared the pile of firewood 
which marked the end of the hundred yards, a cheer began to 
grow and grow, which burst into a roar as he passed the firewood 



JACK LONDON 123 

and halted at command. Every man was tearing himself loose, 
even Matthewson. Hats and mittens were flying in the air. Men 
were shaking hands, it did not matter with whom, and bubbling 
over in a general incoherent babel. 

But Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against 
head, and he was shaking him back and forth. Those who 
hurried up heard him cursing Buck, and he cursed him long and 
fervently, and softly and lovingly. 

"Gad, sir! Gad, sir!" spluttered the Skookum Bench king. 
" I'll give you a thousand for him, sir, a thousand, sir — twelve 
hundred, sir." 

Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were 
streaming frankly down his cheeks. " Sir," he said to the Skookum 
Bench king, " no, sir. You can go to hell, sir. It's the best I 
can do for you, sir," 

Buck seized Thornton's hand in his teeth. Thornton shook 
him back and forth. As though animated by a common impulse, 
the onlookers drew back to a respectful distance ; nor were they 
again indiscreet enough to interrupt. 

THE COMBAT IN THE DESERT 

SIR WALTER SCOTT 

[Chapter i of The Talisman, 1825.] 

— They, too, retired 
To the wilderness, but 'twas with arms. 

Paradise Regained. 

The burning sun of Syria had not yet attained its highest point 
in the horizon, when a knight of the Red Cross, who had left his 
distant northern home and joined the host of the Crusaders in 
Palestine, was pacing slowly along the sandy deserts which lie in 
the vicinity of the Dead Sea, or, as it is called, the Lake Asphal- 
tites, where the waves of the Jordan pour themselves into an 
inland sea, from which there is no discharge of waters. 

The warlike pilgrim had toiled among cliffs and precipices 
during the earlier part of the morning ; more lately, issuing from 



124 ^^^ COMBAT IN THE DESERT 

those rocky and dangerous defiles, he had entered upon that great 
plain, where the accursed cities provoked, in ancient days, the 
direct and dreadful vengeance of the Omnipotent. 

The toil, the thirst, the dangers of the way were forgotten, as 
the traveller recalled the fearful catastrophe which had converted 
into an arid and dismal wilderness the fair and fertile valley of 
Siddim, once well watered, even as the garden of the Lord, now 
a parched and blighted waste, condemned to eternal sterility. 

Crossing himself, as he viewed the dark mass of rolling waters, 
in color as in quality unlike those of every other lake, the trav- 
eller shuddered as he remembered that beneath these sluggish 
waves lay the once proud cities of the plain, whose grave was 
dug by the thunder of the heavens, or the eruption of subterra- 
neous fire, and whose remains were hid, even by that sea which 
holds no living fish in its bosom, bears no skiff on its surface, and, 
as if its own dreadful bed were the only fit receptacle for its sullen 
waters, sends not, like other lakes, a tribute to the ocean. The 
whole land around, as in the days of Moses, was " brimstone and 
salt ; it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth thereon " ; 
the land as well as the lake might be termed dead, as producing 
nothing having resemblance to vegetation, and even the very air 
was entirely devoid of its ordinary winged inhabitants, deterred 
probably by the odor of bitumen and sulphur, which the burning 
sun exhaled from the waters of the lake, in steaming clouds, fre- 
quently assuming the appearance of waterspouts. Masses of the 
slimy and sulphurous substance called naphtha, which floated idly 
on the sluggish and sullen waves, supplied those rolling clouds 
with new vapours, and afforded awful testimony to the truth of the 
Mosaic history. 

Upon this scene of desolation the sun shone with almost in- 
tolerable splendour, and all living nature seemed to have hidden 
itself from the rays, excepting the solitary figure which moved 
through the flitting sand at a foot's pace, and appeared the sole 
breathing thing on the wide surface of the plain. The dress 
of the rider and the accoutrements of his horse were peculiarly 
unfit for the traveller in such a country. A coat of linked mail, 
with long sleeves, plated gauntlets, and a steel breastplate, had not 
been esteemed a sufficient weight of armour : there was also his 



SIR WALTER SCOTT . 125 

triangular shield suspended round his neck, and his barred helmet 
of steel, over which he had a hood and collar of mail, which was 
drawn around the warrior's shoulders and throat, and filled up the 
vacancy between the hauberk and the head-piece. His lower 
limbs were sheathed, like his body, in flexible mail, securing the 
legs and thighs, while the feet rested in plated shoes, which cor- 
responded with the gauntlets. A long, broad, straight-shaped, 
double-edged falchion, with a handle formed like a cross, corre- 
sponded with a stout poniard on the other side. The knight also 
bore, secured to his saddle, with one end resting on his stirrup, 
the long steel-headed lance, his own proper weapon, which, as he 
rode, projected backward, and displayed its little pennoncelle, to 
dally with the faint breeze, or drop in the dead calm. To this 
cumbrous equipment must be added a surcoat of embroidered 
cloth, much frayed and worn, which was thus far useful, that it 
excluded the burning rays of the sun from the armour, which 
they would otherwise have rendered intolerable to the wearer. 
The surcoat bore, in several places, the arms of the owner, although 
much defaced. These seemed to be a couchant leopard, with the 
motto, " I sleep — wake me not." An outline of the same device 
might be traced on his shield, though many a blow had almost 
effaced the painting. The flat top of his cumbrous cylindrical 
helmet was unadorned with any crest. In retaining their own 
unwieldy defensive armor, the northern Crusaders seemed to set 
at defiance the nature of the climate and country to which they 
had come to war. 

The accoutrements of the horse were scarcely less massive and 
unwieldy than those of the rider. The animal had a heavy saddle 
plated with steel, uniting in front with a species of breastplate, 
and behind with defensive armour made to cover the loins. Then 
there was a steel axe, or hammer, called a mace-of-arms, and which 
hung to the saddle-bow ; the reins were secured by chain-work, and 
the front-stall of the bridle was a steel plate, with apertures for the 
eyes and nostrils, having in the midst a short, sharp pike, projecting 
from the forehead of the horse like the horn of the fabulous unicorn. 

But habit had made the endurance of this load of paiiop,ly a 
second nature both to the knight and his gallant charger. Num- 
bers, indeed, of the Western warriors who hurried to Palestine 



126 THE COMBAT IN THE DESERT 

died ere they became inured to the burning climate ; but there 
were others to whom that climate became innocent and even 
friendly, and among this fortunate number was the solitary horse- 
man who now traversed the border of the Dead Sea. 

Nature, which cast his limbs in a mould of uncommon strength, 
fitted to wear his linked hauberk with as much ease as if the 
meshes had been formed of cobwebs, had endowed him with a 
constitution as strong as his limbs, and which bade defiance to 
almost all changes of climate, as well as to fatigue and privations 
of every kind. His disposition seemed, in some degree, to par- 
take of the qualities of his bodily frame ; and as the one possessed 
great strength and endurance, united with the power of violent 
exertion, the other, under a calm and undisturbed semblance, had 
much of the fiery and enthusiastic love of glory which constituted 
the principal attribute of the renowned Norman line, and had 
rendered them sovereigns in every corner of Europe where they 
had drawn their adventurous swords. 

It was not, however, to all the race that fortune proposed such 
tempting rewards ; and those obtained by the solitary knight dur- 
ing two years' campaign in Palestine had been only temporal fame, 
and, as he was taught to believe, spiritual privileges. Meantime, 
his slender stock of money had melted away, the rather that he did 
not pursue any of the ordinary modes by which the followers of 
the Crusade condescended to recruit their diminished resources, 
at the expense of the people of Palestine : he exacted no gifts 
from the wretched natives for sparing their possessions when 
engaged in warfare with the Saracens, and he had not availed him- 
self of any opportunity of enriching himself by the ransom of 
prisoners of consequence. The small train which had followed 
him from his native country had been gradually diminished, as the 
means of maintaining them disappeared, and his only remaining 
squire was at present on a sick-bed, and unable to attend his 
master; who travelled, as we have seen, singly and alone. This 
was of little consequence to the Crusader, who was accustomed to 
consider his good sword as his safest escort, and devout thoughts 
as his best companion. 

Nature had, however, her demands for refreshment and repose, 
even on the iron frame and patient disposition of the Knight of 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 12/ 

the Sleeping Leopard ; and at noon, when the Dead Sea lay at 
some distance on his right, he joyfully hailed the sight of two or 
three palm trees, which arose beside the well which was assigned 
for his midday station. His good horse, too, which had plodded 
forward with the steady endurance of his master, now Ufted his 
head, expanded his nostrils, and quickened his pace, as if he 
snuffed afar off the living waters, which marked the place of re- 
pose and refreshment. But labour and danger were doomed to 
intervene ere the horse or horseman reached the desired spot. 

As the Knight of the Couchant Leopard continued to fix his 
eyes attentively on the yet distant cluster of palm trees, it seemed 
to him as if some object was moving among them. The distant 
form separated itself from the trees, which partly hid its motions, 
and advanced toward the knight with a speed which soon showed 
a mounted horseman, whom his turban, long spear, and green 
caftan floating in the wind, on his nearer approach, showed to be 
a Saracen cavalier. " In the desert," saith an Eastern proverb, 
"no man meets a friend." The Crusader was totally indifferent 
whether the infidel, who now approached on his gallant barb, as if 
borne on the wings of an eagle, came as friend or foe ; perhaps, as 
a vowed champion of the Cross, he might rather have preferred 
the latter. He disengaged his lance from his saddle, seized it 
with the right hand, placed it in rest with its point half elevated, 
gathered up the reins in the left, waked his horse's mettle with the 
spur, and prepared to encounter the stranger with the calm self- 
confidence belonging to the victor in many contests. 

The Saracen came on at the speedy gallop of an Arab horse- 
man, managing his steed more by his limbs and the inflection of 
his body than by any use of the reins, which hung loose in his left 
hand ; so that he was enabled to wield the light round buckler of 
the skin of the rhinoceros, ornamented with silver loops, which 
he wore on his arm, swinging it as if he meant to oppose its 
slender circle to the formidable thrust of the Western lance. His 
own long spear was not couched or levelled like that of his antago- 
nist, but grasped by the middle with his right hand, and bran- 
dished at arm's length above his head. As the cavalier approached 
his enemy at full career, he seemed to expect that the Knight of 
the Leopard should put his horse to the gallop to encounter him. 



128 THE COMBAT IN THE DESERT 

But the Christian knight, well acquainted with the customs of 
Eastern warriors, did not mean to exhaust his good horse by any 
unnecessary exertion ; and, on the contrary, made a dead halt, 
confident that if the enemy advanced to the actual shock, his own 
weight, and that of his powerful charger, would give him sufficient 
advantage, without the additional momentum of rapid motion. 
Equally sensible and apprehensive of such a probable result, the 
Saracen cavalier, when he had approached toward the Christian 
within twice the length of his lance, wheeled his steed to the left 
with inimitable dexterity, and rode twice around his antagonist, 
who, turning without quitting his ground, and presenting his front 
constantly to his enemy, frustrated his attempts to attack him on 
an unguarded point \ so that the Saracen, wheeling his horse, was 
fain to retreat to the distance of an hundred yards. A second 
time, like a hawk attacking a heron, the Heathen renewed the 
charge, and a second time was fain to retreat without coming to a 
close struggle. A third time he approached in the same manner, 
when the Christian knight, desirous to terminate this elusory war- 
fare, in which he might at length have been worn out by the 
activity of his foeman, suddenly seized the mace which hung at 
his saddle-bow, and, with a strong hand and unerring aim, hurled 
it against the head of the Emir, for such and not less his enemy 
appeared. The Saracen was just aware of the formidable missile 
in time to interpose his light buckler betwixt the mace and his 
head ; but the violence of the blow forced the buckler down on 
his turban, and though that defence also contributed to deaden 
its violence, the Saracen was beaten from his horse. Ere the 
Christian could avail himself of this mishap, his nimble foeman 
sprung from the ground, and calling on his horse, which instantly 
returned to his side, he leaped into his seat without touching the 
stirrup, and regained all the advantage of which the Knight of the 
Leopard hoped to deprive him. But the latter had in the mean- 
while Recovered his mace, and the Eastern cavaUer, who remem- 
bered the strength and dexterity with which his antagonist had 
aimed it, seemed to keep cautiously out of reach of that weapon, 
of which he had so lately felt the force, while he showed his pur- 
pose of waging a distant warfare with missile weapons of his own. 
Planting his long spear in the sand at a distance from the scene of 



S//? WALTER SCOTT 129 

combat, he strung, with great address, a short bow which he carried 
at his back, and putting his horse to the gallop, once more de- 
scribed two or three circles of a wider extent than formerly, in the 
course of which he discharged six arrows at the Christian with 
such unerring skill that the goodness of his harness alone saved 
him from being wounded in as many places. The seventh shaft 
apparently found a less perfect part of the armour, and the Christian 
dropped heavily from his horse. But what was the surprise of the 
Saracen, when, dismounting to examine the condition of his pros- 
trate enemy, he found himself suddenly within the grasp of the 
European, who had had recourse to this artifice to bring his enemy 
within his reach ! Even in this deadly grapple, the Saracen was 
saved by his agility and presence of mind. He unloosed the 
sword-belt, in which the Knight of the Leopard had fixed his hold, 
and, thus eluding his fatal grasp, mounted his horse, which seemed 
to watch his motions with the inteUigence of a human being, and 
again rode off. But in the last encounter the Saracen had lost his 
sword and his quiver of arrows, both of which were attached to 
the girdle, which he was obliged to abandon. He had also lost 
his turban in the struggle. These disadvantages seemed to incline 
the Moslem to a truce : he approached the Christian with his 
right hand extended, but no longer in a menacing attitude. 

"There is truce betwixt our nations," he said, in the lingua 
franca commonly used for the purpose of communication with 
the Crusaders ; " wherefore should there be war betwixt thee and 
me? Let there be peace betwixt us." 

" I am well contented," answered he of the Couchant Leopard ; 
" but what security dost thou offer that thou wilt observe the 
truce?" 

"The word of a follower of the Prophet was never broken," 
answered the Emir. "It is thou, brave Nazarene, from whom 
I should demand security, did I not know that treason seldom 
dwells with courage." 

The Crusader felt that the confidence of the Moslem made him 
ashamed of his own doubts. 

" By the cross of my sword," he said, laying his hand on the 
weapon as he spoke, " I will be true companion to thee, Saracen, 
while our fortune wills that we remain in company together." 

K 



130 DAVID AND THE ARK 

" By Mahommed, Prophet of God, and by Allah, God of the 
Prophet," replied his late foeman, " there is not treachery in my 
heart toward thee. And now wend we to yonder fountain, for 
the hour of rest is at hand, and the stream had hardly touched 
my Hp when I was called to battle by thy approach." 

The Knight of the Couchant Leopard yielded a ready and 
courteous assent ; and the late foes, without an angry look or 
gesture of doubt, rode side by side to the little cluster of palm 
trees. 

DAVID AND THE ARK 

CHARLES DICKENS 

[From chapter 3 of The Personal History and Experience of David Copper- 
field the Younger, 1849-50.] 

The carrier's horse was the laziest horse in the world, I 
should hope, and shuffled along, with his head down, as if he 
liked to keep the people waiting to whom the packages were 
directed. I fancied, indeed, that he sometimes chuckled audibly 
over this reflection, but the carrier said he was only troubled 
with a cough. 

The carrier had a way of keeping his head down, like his 
horse, and of drooping sleepily forward as he drove, with one of 
his arms on each of his knees. I say " drove," but it struck 
me that the cart would have gone to Yarmouth quite as well 
without him, for the horse did all that ; and as to conversation, 
he had no idea of it but whistling. 

Peggotty had a basket of refreshments on her knee, which 
would have lasted us out handsomely, if we had been going to 
London by the same conveyance. We ate a good deal, and 
slept a good deal. Peggotty always went to sleep with her chin 
upon the handle of the basket, her hold of which never relaxed ;• 
and I could not have believed unless I had heard her do it, 
that one defenceless woman could have snored so much. 

We made so many deviations up and down lanes, and were 
such a long time delivering a bedstead at a public-house, and 
calling at other places, that I was quite tired, and very glad. 



CHARLES DICKENS 



131 



when we saw Yarmouth. It looked rather spongy and soppy, 
I thought, as I carried my eye over the great dull waste that 
lay across the river ; and I could not help wondering, if the 
world were really as round as my geography-book said, how 
any part of it came to be so flat. But I reflected that Yar- 
mouth might be situated at one of the poles ; which would 
account for it. 

As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent pros- 
pect lying a straight low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty 
that a mound or so might have improved it ; and also that if the 
land had been a little more separated from the sea, and the town 
and the tide had not been quite so much mixed up, like toast and 
water, it would have been nicer. But Peggotty said, with greater 
emphasis than usual, that we must take things as we found them, 
and that for her part, she was proud to call herself a Yarmouth 
Bloater. 

When we got into the street (which was strange enough to 
me), and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw 
the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling up and down 
over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place an injus- 
tice ; and said as much to Peggotty, who heard my expressions 
of delight with great complacency, and told me it was well 
known (I suppose to those who had the good fortune to be born 
Bloaters), that Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest place 
in the universe. 

"Here's my Am!" screamed Peggotty, "growed out of 
knowledge! " 

He was waiting for us, in fact, at the public-house ; and asked 
me how I found myself, like an old acquaintance. I did not 
feel, at first, that I knew him as well as he knew me, because he 
had never come to our house since the night I was born, and 
naturally he had the advantage of me. But our intimacy was 
much advanced by his taking me on his back to carry me home. 
He was, now, a huge, strong fellow of six feet high, broad in 
proportion, and round-shouldered ; but with a simpering boy's 
face and curly light hair that gave him quite a sheepish look. 
He was dressed in a canvas jacket, and a pair of such very stiff 
trousers that they would have stood quite as well alone, without 



132 DAVID AND THE ARK 

any legs in them. And you couldn't so properly have said he 
wore a hat, as that he was covered in a-top, like an old building, 
with something pitchy. 

Ham carrying me on his back, and a small box of ours under 
his arm, and Peggotty carrying another small box of ours, we 
turned down lanes bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks 
of sand, and went past gas-works, rope-walks, boat-builders' 
yards, shipwrights' yards, ship-breakers' yards, caulkers' yards, 
riggers' lofts, smiths' forges, and a great litter of such places, 
until we came out upon the dull waste I had already seen at a 
distance ; when Ham said : — 

" Yon's our house, Mas'r Davy ! " 

I looked in all directions, as far as I could stare over the wil- 
derness, and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no 
house could / make out. There was a black barge, or some 
other kind of superannuated boat, not far off, high and dry on the 
ground, with an iron funnel sticking out of it for a chimney and 
smoking very cosily ; but nothing else in the way of a habitation 
that was visible to me. 

" That's not it ? " said I. " That ship-looking thing ? " 

" That's it, Mas'r Davy," returned Ham. 

If it had been Aladdin's palace, roc's egg and all, I suppose 
I could not have been more charmed with the romantic idea of 
living in it. There was a delightful door cut in the side, and it 
was roofed in, and there were little windows in it ; but the won- 
derful charm of it was, that it was a real boat which had no 
doubt been upon the water hundreds of times, and which had 
never been intended to be lived in, on dry land. That was the cap- 
tivation of it to me. If it had ever been meant to be lived in, I 
might have thought it small, or inconvenient, or lonely ; but never 
having been designed for any such use, it became a perfect 
abod^. 

It was beautifully clean inside, and as tidy as possible. 
There was a table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of drawers, 
and on the chest of drawers there was a tea-tray with a painting 
on it of a lady with a parasol, taking a walk with a military- 
looking child who was trundling a hoop. The tray was kept 
from tumbling down, by a Bible ; and the tray, if it had tumbled 



CHARLES DICKENS 1 33 

down, would have smashed a quantity of cups and saucers and 
a teapot that were grouped around the book. On the walls there 
were some common colored pictures, framed and glazed, of 
scripture subjects ; such as I have never seen since in the 
hands of pedlars, without seeing the whole interior of Peggotty's 
brother's house again, at one view. Abraham in red going to 
sacrifice Isaac in blue, and Daniel in yellow cast into a den of 
green lions, were the most prominent of these. Over the little 
mantle-shelf was a picture of the Sarah Jane lugger, built at 
Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on to it ; a 
work of art, combining composition with carpentry, which I con- 
sidered to be one of the most enviable possessions that the 
world could afford. There were some hooks in the beams of 
the ceiling, the use of which I did not divine then ; and some 
lockers and boxes and conveniences of that sort, which served 
for seats and eked out the chairs. 

All this, I saw in the first glance after I crossed the thres- 
hold — childlike, according to my theory — and then Peggotty 
opened a little door and showed me my bedroom. It was the 
completest and most desirable bedroom ever seen — in the stern 
of the vessel ; with a little window, where the rudder used to go 
through ; a little looking-glass, just the right height for me, 
nailed against the wall, and framed with oyster-shells ; a little 
bed, which there was just room enough to get into, and a nose- 
gay of seaweed in a blue mug on the table. The walls were 
whitewashed as white as milk, and the patchwork counterpane 
made my eyes quite ache with its brightness. One thing I 
particularly noticed in th-'s delightful house was the smell of 
fish ; which was so searching that when I took out my pocket- 
handkerchief to wipe my nose, I found it smelt exactly as if it 
had wrapped up a lobster. On my imparting this discovery in 
confidence to Peggotty, she informed me that her brother dealt 
in lobsters, crabs, and crawfish ; and I afterwards found that a 
heap of these creatures, in a state of wonderful conglomeration 
with one another, and never leaving off pinching whatever they 
laid hold of, were usually to be found in a little wooden out- 
house where the pots and kettles were kept. 

We were welcomed by a very civil woman in a white apron, 



134 DAVID AND THE ARK 

whom I had seen curtseying at the door when I was on Ham's 
back, about a quarter of a mile off. Likewise by a most beauti- 
ful little girl (or I thought her so) with a necklace of blue beads 
on, who wouldn't let me kiss her when I offered to, but ran away 
and hid herself. By and by, when we had dined in a sumptuous 
manner off boiled dabs, melted butter, and potatoes, with a chop 
for me, a hairy man with a very good-natured face came home. 
As he called Peggotty " Lass," and gave her a hearty smack on 
the cheek, I had no doubt, from the general propriety of her con- 
duct, that he was her brother ; and so he turned out — being pres- 
ently introduced to me as Mr. Peggotty, the master of the house. 

" Glad to see you, sir," said Mr. Peggotty. " You'll find us 
rough, sir, but you'll find us ready." 

I thanked him, and replied that I was sure I should be happy 
in such a delightful place. 

" How's your ma, sir ? " said Mr. Peggotty. " Did you leave 
her pretty jolly?" 

I gave Mr. Peggotty to understand that she was as jolly as I 
could wish, and that she desired her compliments — which was 
a polite fiction on my part. 

" I'm much obleeged to her, I'm sure," said Mr. Peggotty. 
" Well, sir, if you can make out here, for a fortnut, 'long wi' 
her," nodding at his sister, " and Ham, and little Em'ly, we 
shall be proud of your company." 

Having done the honors of his house in this hospitable manner, 
Mr. Peggotty went out to wash himself in a kettleful of hot water, 
remarking that " cold would never get his muck off." He soon 
returned, greatly improved in appearance ; but so rubicund, that 
I couldn't help thinking his face had this in common with the 
lobsters, crabs, and crawfish, — that it went into the hot water 
very black, and came out very red. 

After tea, when the door was shut and all was made snug 
(the nights being cold and misty now), it seemed to me the most 
delicious retreat that the imagination of man could conceive. 
To hear the wind getting up out at sea, to know that the fog 
was creeping over the desolate fiat outside, and to look at the 
fire, and think that there was no house near but this one, and 
this one a boat, was like enchantment. Little Em'ly had over- 



CHARLES DICKENS 



135 



come her shyness, and was sitting by my side upon the lowest 
and least of the lockers, which was just large enough for us two, 
and just fitted into the chimney corner. Mrs. Peggotty with 
the white apron was knitting on the opposite side of the fire. 
Peggotty at her needle-work was as much at home with Saint 
Paul's and the bit of wax-candle as if they had never known 
any other roof. Ham, who had been giving me my first lesson 
in all-fours, was trying to recollect a scheme for telling fortunes 
with the dirty cards, and was printing off fishy impressions of 
his thumb on all the cards he turned. Mr. Peggotty was smok- 
ing his pipe. I felt it was a time for conversation and confidence. 

"Mr. Peggotty," says I. 

" Sir," says he. 

" Did you give your son the name of Ham, because you lived 
in a sort of ark ? " 

Mr. Peggotty seemed to think it a deep idea, but answered: — 

" No, sir. I never giv him no name." 

" Who gave him that name, then ? " said I, putting question 
number two of the catechism to Mr. Peggotty. 

" Why, sir, his father giv it him," said Mr. Peggotty. 

" I thought you were his father ! " 

" My brother Joe was his father," said Mr. Peggotty. 

" Dead, Mr. Peggotty ? " I hinted, after a respectful pause. 

" Drowndead," said Mr. Peggotty. 

I was very much surprised that Mr. Peggotty was not Ham's 
father, and began to wonder whether I was mistaken about his 
relationship to anybody else there. I was so curious to know, 
that I made up my mind to have it out with Mr. Peggotty. 

" Little Em'ly," I said, glancing at her. " She is your daugh- 
ter, isn't she, Mr. Peggotty ? " 

" No, sir. My brother-in-law, Tom, was her father." 

I couldn't help it. " — Dead, Mr. Peggotty ? " I hinted, after 
another respectful silence. 

"Drowndead," said Mr. Peggotty. 

I felt the difficulty of resuming the subject, but had not got 
to the bottom of it yet, and must get to the bottom somehow. 
So I said : — 

" Haven't you any children, Mr. Peggotty ? " 



136 DAVID AND THE ARK 

" No, master," he answered, with a short laugh. " I'm a 
bacheldore." 

"A bachelor!" I said, astonished. "Why, who's that, Mr. 
Peggotty ? " pointing to the person in the apron who was 
knitting. 

" That's Missis Gummidge," said Mr. Peggotty. 

" Gummidge, Mr. Peggotty ? " 

But at this point Peggotty — I mean my own peculiar Peg- 
gotty — made such impressive motions to me not to ask any 
more questions, that I could only sit and look at all the silent 
company, until it was time to go to bed. Then, in the privacy 
of my own little cabin, she informed me that Ham and Em'ly 
were an orphan nephew and niece, whom my host had at differ- 
ent times adopted in their childhood, when they were left desti- 
tute ; and that Mrs. Gummidge was the widow of his partner in 
a boat, who had died very poor. He was but a poor man him- 
self, said Peggotty, but as good as gold and as true as steel — 
those were her similes. The only subject, she informed me, on 
which he ever showed a violent temper or swore an oath, was 
this generosity of his ; and if it were ever referred to, by any 
one of them, he struck the table a heavy blow with his right 
hand (had split it on one such occasion), and swore a dreadful 
oath that he would be "Gormed " if he didn't cut and run for 
good, if it was ever mentioned again. It appeared, in answer to 
my inquiries, that nobody had the least idea of the etymology of 
this terrible verb passive to be gormed ; but that they all regarded 
it as constituting a most solemn imprecation. 

I was very sensible of my entertainer's goodness, and listened 
to the women's going to bed in another little crib like mine at 
the opposite end of the boat, and to him and Ham hanging up 
two hammocks for themselves on the hooks I had noticed in the 
roof, in a very luxurious state of mind, enhanced by my being 
sleepy.' As slumber gradually stole upon me, I heard the wind 
howling out at sea and coming on across the flat so fiercely, that 
I had a lazy apprehension of the great deep rising in the night. 
But I bethought myself that I was in a boat, after all ; and that 
a man like Mr. Peggotty was not a bad person to have on board 
if anything did happen. 



CHARLES DICKENS 1 37 

Nothing happened, however, worse than morning. Almost as 
soon as it shone upon the oyster-shell frame of my mirror I was 
out of bed, and out with little Em'ly, picking up stones upon the 
beach. 

" You're quite a sailor, I suppose ? " I said to Em'ly. I don't 
know that I supposed anything of the kind, but I felt it an act 
of gallantry to say something ; and a shining sail close to us 
made such a pretty little image of itself, at the moment, in her 
bright eye, that it came into my head to say this. 

" No," replied Em'ly, shaking her head," I'm afraid of the sea." 

" Afraid ! " I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and look- 
ing very big at the mighty ocean. " /an't ! " 

" Ah ! but it's cruel," said Em'ly. " I have seen it very cruel 
to some of our men. I have seen it tear a boat as big as our 
house all to pieces." 

" I hope it wasn't the boat that — " 

" That father was drownded in ? " said Em'ly. " No. Not 
that one, I never see that boat." 

" Nor him ? " I asked her. 

Little Em'ly shook her head. " Not to remember ! " 

Here was a coincidence ! I immediately went into an expla- 
nation how I had never seen my own father ; and how my 
mother and I had always lived by ourselves in the happiest 
state imaginable, and lived so then, and always meant to live 
so ; and how my father's grave was in the churchyard near our 
house, and shaded by a tree, beneath the boughs of which I had 
walked and heard the birds sing many a pleasant morning. But 
there were some differences between Em'ly's orphanhood and 
mine, it appeared. She had lost her mother before her father ; 
and where her father's grave was no one knew, except that it 
was somewhere in the depths of the sea. 

" Besides," said Em'ly, as she looked about for shells and 
pebbles, " your father was a gentleman and your mother is a 
lady ; and my father was a fisherman and my mother was a 
fisherman's daughter, and my uncle Dan is a fisherman." 

" Dan is Mr. Peggotty, is he ? " said I. 

"Uncle Dan — yonder," answered Em'ly, nodding at the 
boat-house. 



138 DAVID AND THE ARK 

" Yes. I mean him. He must be very good, I should think." 

" Good ? " said Em'ly. " If I was ever to be a lady, I'd give 
him a sky-blue coat with diamond buttons, nankeen trousers, a 
red velvet waistcoat, a cocked hat, a large gold watch, a silver 
pipe, and a box of money." 

I said I had no doubt that Mr. Peggotty well deserved these 
treasures. I must acknowledge that I felt it difficult to picture 
him quite at his ease in the raiment proposed for him by his 
grateful little niece, and that I was particularly doubtful of the 
policy of the cocked hat ; but I kept these sentiments to myself. 

Little Em'ly had stopped and looked up at the sky in her 
enumeration of these articles, as if they were a glorious vision. 
We went on again, picking up shells and pebbles. 

" You would like to be a lady ? " I said. 

Em'ly looked at me, and laughed and nodded "yes." 

" I should like it very much. We would all be gentlefolks 
together, then. Me, and uncle, and Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge. 
We wouldn't mind then, when there come stormy weather. — Not 
for our own sakes, I mean. We would for the poor fishermen's, 
to be sure, and we'd help 'em with money when they come to 
any hurt." 

This seemed to me to be a very satisfactory and therefore 
not at all improbable picture. I expressed my pleasure in the 
contemplation of it, and little Em'ly was emboldened to say, shyly, 

" Don't you think you are afraid of the sea, now ? " 

It was quiet enough to reassure me, but I have no doubt if I 
had seen a moderately large wave come tumbling in, I should 
have taken to my heels, with an awful recollection of her 
drowned relations. However, I said " No," and I added, 
"You don't seem to be, either, though you say you are;" — 
for she was walking much too near the brink of a sort of old 
jetty or wooden causeway we had strolled upon, and I was 
afraid 6f her falling over. 

" I'm not afraid in this way," said little Em'ly. " But I wake 
when it blows, and tremble to think of Uncle Dan and Ham, 
and believe I hear 'em crying out for help. That's why I should 
like so much to be a lady. But I'm not afraid in this way. 
Not a bit. Look here ! " 



CHARLES DICKENS 



139 



She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber 
which protruded from the place we stood upon, and overhung 
the deep water at some height, without the least defence. The 
incident is so impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a 
draughtsman I could draw its form here, I daresay, accurately 
as it was that day, and little Em'ly springing forward to her de- 
struction (as it appeared to me), with a look that I have never 
forgotten, directed far out to sea. 

The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back 
safe to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I 
had uttered ; fruitlessly in any case, for there was no one near. 
But there have been times since, in my manhood, many times 
there have been, when I have thought. Is it possible, among 
the possibilities of hidden things, that in the sudden rashness of 
the child and her wild look so far off, there was any merciful 
attractioni of her into danger, any tempting her towards him 
permitted on the part of her dead father, that her life might 
have a chance of ending that day. There has been a time 
since when I have wondered whether, if the life before her 
could have been revealed to me at a glance, and so revealed as 
that a child could fully comprehend it, and if her preservation 
could have depended on a motion of my hand, I ought to have 
held it up to save her. There has been a time since — I do not 
say it lasted long, but it has been — when I have asked myself 
the question. Would it have been better for little Em'ly to have 
had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight, 
and when I have answered Yes. 

This may be premature. I have set it down too soon, per- 
haps. But let it stand. 

We strolled a long way, and loaded ourselves with things that 
we thought curious, and put some stranded star-fish carefully 
back into the water — I hardly know enough of the race at this 
moment to be quite certain whether they had reason to feel 
obliged to us for doing so, or the reverse — and then made our 
way home to Mr, Peggotty's dwelling. We stopped under the 
lee of the lobster-outhouse to exchange an innocent kiss, and 
went in to breakfast glowing with health and pleasure. 

" Like two young mavishes," Mr. Peggotty said. I knew this 



140 DAVID AMD THE ARK 

meant, in our local dialect, like two young thrushes, and re- 
ceived it as a compliment. 

Of course I was in love with little Em'ly. I am sure I loved 
that baby quite as tenderly, with greater purity and more dis- 
interestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time 
of life, high and ennobling as it is. I am sure my fancy raised 
up something round that blue-eyed mite of a child, which 
etherealised, and made a very angel of her. If, any sunny fore- 
noon, she had spread a little pair of wings and flown away be- 
fore my eyes, I don't think I should have regarded it as much 
more than I had reason to expect. 

We used to walk about that dim old flat at Yarmouth in a 
loving manner, hours and hours. The days sported by us, as 
if Time had not grown up himself yet, but were a child too, and 
always at play. I told Em'ly I adored her, and that unless she 
confessed she adored me I should be reduced to the necessity of 
killing myself with a sword. She said she did, and I have no 
doubt she did. 

As to any sense of inequality, or youthfulness, or other diffi- 
culty in our way, little Em'ly and I had no such trouble, because 
we had no future. We made no more provision for growing 
older, than we did for growing younger. We were the admira- 
tion of Mrs. Gummidge and Peggotty, who used to whisper of 
an evening when we sat, lovingly, on our little locker side by 
side, " Lor ! wasn't it beautiful ! " Mr. Peggotty smiled at us 
from behind his pipe, and Ham grinned all the evening and did 
nothing else. They had something of the sort of pleasure in us, 
I suppose, that they might have had in a pretty toy, or a pocket 
model of the Colosseum. 

I soon found out that Mrs. Gummidge did not always make her- 
self so agreeable as she might have been expected to do, under 
the circumstances of her residence with Mr. Peggotty. Mrs. Gum- 
midge's was rather a fretful disposition, and she whimpered more 
sometimes than was comfortable for other parties in so small 
an establishment. I was very sorry for her ; but there were mo- 
ments when it would have been more agreeable, I thought, if 
Mrs. Gummidge had had a convenient apartment of her own to 
retire to, and had stopped there until her spirits revived. 



CHARLES DICKENS 



141 



Mr, Peggotty went occasionally to a public-house called The 
Willing Mind. I discovered this, by his being out on the sec- 
ond or third evening of our visit, and by Mrs. Gummidge's look- 
ing up at the Dutch clock, between eight and nine, and saying 
he was there, and that, what was more, she had known in the 
morning he would go there. 

Mrs. Gummidge had been in a low state all day, and had 
burst into tears in the forenoon, when the fire smoked. " I am 
a lone lorn creetur','' were Mrs. Gummidge's words, when that 
unpleasant occurrence took place, " and everythink goes con- 
trairy with me." 

"Oh, it'll soon leave ofif," said Peggotty — I again mean our 
Peggotty — " and besides, you know, it's not more disagreeable 
to you than to us." 

" I feel it more," said Mrs. Gummidge. 

It was a very cold day, with cutting blasts of wind. Mrs. 
Gummidge's peculiar corner of the fireside seemed to me to be 
the warmest and snuggest in the place, as her chair was cer- 
tainly the easiest, but it didn't suit her that day at all. She 
was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a 
visitation in her back which she called "the creeps." At last 
she shed tears on that subject, and said again that she was " a 
lone lorn creetur' and everythink went contrairy with her." 

" It is certainly very cold," said Peggotty. " Everybody must 
feel it so." 

" I feel it more than other people," said Mrs. Gummidge. 

So at dinner ; when Mrs. Gummidge was always helped 
immediately after me, to whom the preference was given as a 
visitor of distinction. The fish were small and bony, and the 
potatoes were a little burnt. We all acknowledged that we felt 
this something of a disappointment ; but Mrs. Gummidge said 
she felt it more than we did, and shed tears again, and made 
that former declaration with great bitterness. 

Accordingly, when Mr. Peggotty came home about nine 
o'clock, this unfortunate Mrs. Gummidge was knitting in her 
corner in a very wretched and miserable condition. Peggotty 
had been working cheerfully. Ham had been patching up a 
great pair of water-boots ; and I, with little Em'ly by my side, 



142 DAVID AND THE ARK 

had been reading to them. Mrs. Gummidge had never made 
any other remark than a forlorn sigh, and had never raised her 
eyes since tea. 

"Well, Mates," said Mr. Peggotty, taking his seat, " and how 
are you ? " 

We all said something, or looked something, to welcome him, 
except Mrs. Gummidge, who only shook her head over her knit- 
ting. 

" What's amiss ? " said Mr. Peggotty, with a clap of his hands. 
" Cheer up, old Mawther ! " (Mr. Peggotty meant old girl.) 

Mrs. Gummidge did not appear to be able to cheer up. She 
took out an old black silk handkerchief and wiped her eyes ; 
but instead of putting it in her pocket, kept it out, and wiped 
them again, and still kept it out, ready for use. 

" What's amiss, dame ? " said Mr. Peggotty. 

" Nothing," returned Mrs. Gummidge. " You've come from 
The Willing Mind, Dan'l ? " 

" Why, yes, I've took a short spell at The Willing Mind to- 
night," said Mr. Peggotty. 

" I'm sorry I should drive you there," said Mrs. Gummidge. 

" Drive ! I don't wan't no driving," returned Mr. Peggotty, 
with an honest laugh. " I only go too ready." 

" Very ready," said Mrs. Gummidge, shaking her head, and 
wiping her eyes. "Yes, yes, very ready. I am sorry it should 
be along of me that you're so ready." 

"Along o' you? It an't along o' you! " said Mr. Peggotty. 
" Don't ye believe a bit on it." 

" Yes, yes, it is," cried Mrs. Gummidge. " I knov/ what I 
am. I know that I am a lone lorn creetur' and not only that 
everythink goes contrairy with me, but that I go contrairy with 
everybody. Yes, yes. I feel more than other people do, and I 
show it more. It's my misfortun'." 

I really couldn't help thinking, as I sat taking in all this, that 
the misfortune extended to some other members of that family 
besides Mrs. Gummidge. But Mr. Peggotty made no such re- 
tort, only answering with another entr.eaty to Mrs. Gummidge to 
cheer up. 

" I an't what I could wish myself to be," said Mrs. Gum- 



CHARLES DICKENS 1 43 

midge. " I am far from it. I know what I am. My troubles 
has made me contrairy, I feel my troubles, and they make me 
contrairy. I wish I didn't feel 'em, but I do. I wish I could 
be hardened to 'em, but I an't. I make the house uncomfort- 
able. I don't wonder at it. I've made your sister so all day, and 
Master Davy." 

Here I was suddenly melted, and roared out, " No, you haven't, 
Mrs. Gummidge," in great mental distress. 

" It's far from right that I should do it," said Mrs. Gummidge. 
" It an't a fit return. I had better go into the house and die. 
I am a lone lorn creetur', and had much better not make myself 
contrairy here. If thinks must go contrairy with me, and I 
must go contrairy myself, let me go contrairy in my parish. 
Dan'l, I'd better go into the house, and die and be a riddance!" 

Mrs. Gummidge retired with these words, and betook herself 
to bed. When she was gone, Mr. Peggotty, who had not ex- 
hibited a trace of any feeling but the profoundest sympathy, 
looked round upon us, and nodding his head with a lively 
expression of that sentiment still animating his face, said in a 
whisper : 

" She's been thinking of the old 'un ! " 

I did not quite understand what old one Mrs. Gummidge was 
supposed to have fixed her mind upon, until Peggotty, on see- 
ing me to bed, explained that it was the late Mr. Gummidge ; 
and that her brother always took that for a received truth on 
such occasions, and that it always had a moving effect upon 
him. Some time after he was in his hammock that night, I 
heard him myself repeat to Ham : "Poor thing! She's been 
thinking of the old 'un ! " And whenever Mrs. Gummidge was 
overcome in a similar manner during the remainder of our stay 
(which happened some few times), he always said the same 
thing in extenuation of the circumstance, and always with the 
tenderest commiseration. 

So the fortnight slipped away, varied by nothing but the varia- 
tion of the tide, which altered Mr. Peggotty's times of going out 
and coming in, and altered Ham's engagements also. When the 
latter was unemployed, he sometimes walked with us to show 
us the boats and ships, and once or twice he took us for a row. 



144 PENDENNIS FALLS LN LOVE 

I don't know why one slight set of impressions should be more 
particularly associated with a place than another, though I be- 
lieve this obtains with most people, in reference especially to the 
associations of their childhood. I never hear the name, or read 
the name, of Yarmouth, but I am reminded of a certain Sunday 
morning on the beach, the bells ringing for church, little Em'Iy 
leaning on my shoulder, Ham lazily dropping stones into the 
water, and the sun, away at sea, just breaking through the heavy 
mist, and showing us the ships, like their own shadows. 



PENDENNIS FALLS IN LOVE 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 

[From chapters 3 and 4 of The Lfistory of Pendennis : his Fortunes and 
Misforttines, his Friends and his Greatest Enemy, 1849-50.] 

While these natural sentiments were waging war and trouble in 
honest Pen's bosom, it chanced one day that he rode into Chat- 
teris for the purpose of carrying to the County Chronicle a tre- 
mendous and thrilling poem for the next week's paper; and putting 
up his horse, according to custom, at the stables of the George 
Hotel there, he fell in with an old acquaintance. A grand black 
tandem, with scarlet wheels, came rattling into the inn yard, as 
Pen stood there in converse with the hostler about Rebecca ; and 
the voice of the driver called out, " Hallo, Pendennis, is that 
you ? " in a loud patronizing manner. Pen had some difficulty 
in recognizing, under the broad-brimmed hat and the vast great- 
coats and neckcloths, with which the new comer was habited, the 
person and figure of his quondam school-fellow, Mr. Foker. 

A year's absence had made no small difference in that gentle- 
man. A youth who had been deservedly whipped a few months 
previously, and who spent his pocket-money on tarts and hard- 
bake, now appeared before Pen in one of those costumes to which 
public consent, which I take to be quite as influential in this re- 
spect as Johnson's Dictionary, has awa,rded the title of " Swell." - 
He had a bull-dog between his legs, and in his scarlet shawl neck- 
cloth was a pin representing another bull-dog in gold : he wore a 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 1 45 

fur waistcoat laced over with gold chains ; a green cut-away coat 
with basket buttons, and a white upper-coat ornamented with 
cheese-plate buttons, on each of which was engraved some stirring 
incident of the road or the chase ; all of which ornaments set off 
this young fellow's figure to such advantage that you would hesi- 
tate to say which character in life he most resembled, and whether 
he was a boxer en goguette^ or a coachman in his gala suit. 

" Left that place for good, Pendennis?" Mr. Foker said, descend- 
ing from his landau and giving Pendennis a finger. 

" Yes, this year or more," Pen said. 

" Beastly old hole," Mr. Foker remarked. " Hate it. Hate 
the Doctor ; hate Towzer, the second master : hate everybody 
there. Not a fit place for a gentleman." 

" Not at all," said Pen, with an air of the utmost consequence. 

" By gad, sir, I sometimes dream, now, that the Doctor's walk- 
ing into me," Foker continued (and Pen smiled as he thought 
that he himself had hkewise fearful dreams of this nature). 
" When I think of the diet there, by gad, sir, I wonder how I 
stood it. Mangy mutton, brutal beef, pudding on Thursdays and 
Sundays, and that fit to poison you. Just look at my leader — 
did you ever see a prettier animal? Drove over from Baymouth. 
Came the nine mile in two-and-forty minutes. Not bad going, 
sir." 

" Are you stopping at Baymouth, Foker? " Pendennis asked. 

" I'm coaching there," said the other with a nod. 

" What? " asked Pen, and in a tone of such wonder that Foker 
burst out laughing, and said, " He was blovved if he didn't think 
Pen was such a flat as not to know what coaching meant." 

" Pm come down with a coach from Oxbridge. A tutor, don't 
you see, old boy? He's coaching me, and some other men, for 
the little go. Me and Spavin have the drag between us. And 1 
thought rd just tool over, and go to the play. Did you ever see 
Rowkins do the hornpipe?" and Mr. Foker began to perform 
some steps of that popular dance in the inn yard, looking round 
for the sympathy of his groom, and the stable men. 

Pen thought he would like to go to the play too : and could 
ride home afterwards, as there was a moonlight. So he accepted 

1 [In good humor.] 
L 



146 PENDENNIS FALLS LN LOVE 

Foker's invitation to dinner, and the young men entered the inn 
together, where Mr. Foker stopped at the bar, and called upon 
Miss Rummer, the landlady's fair daughter, who presided there, to 
give him a glass of "his mixture." 

Pen and his family had been known at the George ever since 
they came into the county; and Mr. Pendennis's carriage and 
horses always put up there when he paid a visit to the county town. 
The landlady dropped the heir of Fairoaks a very respectful cour- 
tesy, and complimented him upon his growth and manly appear- 
ance, and asked news of the family at Fairoaks, and of Dr. Portman 
and the Clavering people, to all of which questions the young 
gentleman answered with much affability. But he spoke to Mr. 
and Mrs. Rummer with that sort of good nature with which a 
young Prince addresses his father's subjects ; never dreaming that 
those boHiies gens ^ were his equals in life. 

Mr. Foker's behaviour was quite different. He inquired for 
Rummer and the cold in his nose, told Mrs. Rummer a riddle, 
asked Miss Rummer when she would be ready to marry him, and 
paid his comphments to Miss Brett, the other young lady in the 
bar, all in a minute of time, and with a liveliness and facetiousness 
which set all these ladies in a giggle ; and he gave a cluck, ex- 
pressive of great satisfaction, as he tossed off his mixture, which 
Miss Rummer prepared and handed to him. 

" Have a drop," said he to Pen. " Give the young one a glass, 
R., and score it up to yours truly." 

Poor Pen took a glass, and everybody laughed at the face which 
he made as he put it down. — Gin, bitters, and some other cordial, 
was the compound with which Mr. Foker was so delighted as to 
call it by the name of Foker's own. As Pen choked, sputtered, 
and made faces, the other took occasion to remark to Mr. Rum- 
mer that the young fellow was green, very green, but that he 
would soon form him ; and then they proceeded to order dinner — 
which Mr. Foker determined should consist of turtle and venison ; 
cautioning the landlady to be very particular about icing the wine. 

Then Messrs. Foker and Pen strolled down the High Street 
together — the former having a cigar in his mouth, which he had 
drawn out of a case almost as big as a portmanteau. He went in 

1 [Good people.] 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 147 

to replenish it at Mr. Lewis's, and talked to that gentleman for a 
while, sitting down on the counter : he then looked in at the 
fruiterer's, to see the pretty girl there : then they passed the 
County Chronicle office, for which Pen had his packet ready, in 
the shape of " Lines to Thyrza," but poor Pen did not like to put 
the letter into the editor's box while walking in company with 
such a fine gentleman as Mr. Foker. They met heavy dragoons 
of the regiment always quartered at Chatteris : and stopped and 
talked about the Baymouth balls, and what a pretty girl was Miss 
Brown, and what a dem fine woman Mrs. Jones was. It was in 
vain that Pen recalled to his own mind how stupid Foker used to 
be at school — how he could scarcely read, how he was not cleanly 
in his person, and notorious for his blunders and dulness. Mr. 
Foker was not more refined now than in his school days : and yet 
Pen felt a secret pride in strutting down High Street with a young 
fellow who owned tandems, talked to officers, and ordered turtle 
and champagne for dinner. He listened, and with respect too, to 
Mr. Foker's accounts of what the men did at the university of 
which Mr. F. was an ornament, and encountered a long series 
of stories about boat-racing, bumping, College grass-plats, and 
milk-punch — and began to wish to go up himself to College to a 
place where there were such manly pleasures and enjoyments. 
Farmer Gurnett, who lives close by Fairoaks, riding by at this 
minute and touching his hat to Pen, the latter stopped him, and 
sent a message to his mother to say that he had met with an old 
school-fellow, and should dine in Chatteris. 

The two young gentlemen continued their walk, and were pass- 
ing round the Cathedral Yard, where they could hear the music 
of the afternoon service (a music which always exceedingly affected 
Pen), but whither Mr. Foker came for the purpose of inspecting 
the nursery maids who frequent the Elms Walk there, and here 
they strolled until with a final burst of music the small congrega- 
tion was played out. 

Old Doctor Portman was one of the few who came from the 
venerable gate. Spying Pen, he came and shook him by the 
hand, and eyed with wonder Pen's friend, from whose mouth and 
cigar clouds of fragrance issued, which curled round the Doctor's 
honest face and shovel hat. 



148 PENDENNIS FALLS LN LOVE 

" An old school-fellow of mine, Mr. Foker," said Pen. The 
Doctor said '• H'm " : and scowled at the cigar. He did not mind 
a pipe in his study, but the cigar was an abomination to the 
worthy gentleman. 

" I came up on Bishop's business," the Doctor said. " We'll 
ride home, Arthur, if you like?" 

"I — I'm engaged to my friend here," Pen answered. 

" You had better come home with me," said the Doctor. 

" His mother knows he's out, sir," Mr. Foker remarked : " don't 
she, Pendennis? " 

" But that does not prove that he had not better come home 
with me," the Doctor growled, and he walked off with great dignity. 

" Old boy don't like the weed, I suppose," Foker said. " Ha ! 
who's here? — here's the General, and Bingley, the manager. 
How do, Cos? How do, Bingley?" 

"How does my worthy and gallant young Foker?" said the 
gentleman addressed as the General, and who wore a shabby 
military cape with a mangy collar, and a hat cocked very much 
over one eye. 

"Trust you are very well, my very dear sir," said the other 
gentleman, " and that the Theatre Royal will have the honour of 
your patronage to-night. We perform The Stranger, in which 
your humble servant will — " 

" Can't stand you in tights and Hessians, Bingley," young Mr. 
Foker said. On which the General, with the Irish accent, said : 
" But I think ye'U like Miss Fotheringay, in Mrs. Haller, or me 
name's not Jack Costigan." 

Pen looked at these individuals with the greatest interest. He 
had never seen an actor before ; and he saw Dr. Portman's red 
face looking over the Doctor's shoulder, as he retreated from the 
Cathedral Yard, evidently quite dissatisfied with the acquaintances 
into whose hands Pen had fallen. 

Perhaps it would have been much better for him had he taken 
the parson's advice and company home. But which of us knows 
his fate? 

Having returned to the George, Mr. Foker and his guest sat 
down to a handsome repast in the coffee-room ; where Mr. Rum- 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 149 

mer brought in the first dish, and bowed as gravely as if he was 
waiting upon the Lord-Lieutenant of the county. 

Pen could not but respect Foker's connoisseurship as he pro- 
nounced the champagne to be condemned gooseberry, and winked 
at the port with one eye. The latter he declared to be of the 
right sort ; and told the waiters there was no way of humbugging 
him. All these attendants he knew by their Christian names, and 
showed a great interest in their families ; and, as the London 
coaches drove up, which in those early days used to set off from 
the George, Mr. Foker flung the coffee-room window open, and 
called the guards and coachmen by their Christian names, too, 
asking about their respective families, and imitating with great 
liveliness and accuracy the tooting of the horns as Jem the ostler 
whipped the horses' cloths off, and the carriages drove gaily 
away. 

" A bottle of sherry, a bottle of sham, a bottle of port, and a 
shass caffy, it ain't so bad, hay, Pen ? " Foker said, and pronounced, 
after all these dehcacies and a quantity of nuts and fruit had been 
despatched, that it was time to " toddle." Pen sprang up with 
very bright eyes, and a flushed face ; and they moved off towards 
the theatre, where they paid their money to the wheezy old lady 
slumbering in the money-taker's box. " Mrs. Dropsicum, Bing- 
ley's mother-in-law, great in Lady Macbeth," Foker said to this 
companion. Foker knew her, too. 

They had almost their choice of places in the boxes of the 
theatre, which was no better filled than country theatres usually 
are, in spite of the " universal burst of attraction and galvanic 
thrills of delight," advertised by Bingley in the play-bills. A score 
or so of people dotted the pit-benches, a few more kept a-kicking 
and whistling in the galleries, and a dozen others, who came in 
with free admissions, were in the boxes where our gentlemen sat. 
Lieutenants Rodgers and Podgers, and young Cronet Tidmus, of 
the Dragoons, occupied a private box. The performers acted to 
them, and these gentlemen seemed to hold conversations with the 
players when not engaged in the dialogue, and applauded them by 
name loudly. 

Bingley, the manager, who assumed all the chief tragic and 
comic parts, except when he modestly retreated to make way for 



I50 PENDENNIS FALLS IN LOVE 

the London stars, who came down occasionally to Chatteris, was 
great in the character of the Stranger. He was attired in the 
tight pantaloons and Hessian boots which the stage legend has 
given to that injured man, with a large cloak and beaver, and a 
hearse-feather in it drooping over his raddled old face, and only 
partially concealing his great buckled brown wig. He had the 
stage-jewelry on, too, of which he selected the largest and most 
shiny rings for himself, and allowed his little finger to quiver out 
of his cloak with a sham diamond ring covering the first joint of 
the finger and twiddling in the faces of the pit. Bingley made it 
a favour to the young men of his company to go on in light comedy 
parts with that ring. They flattered him by asking its history. 
The stage has its traditional jewels, as the Crown and all great 
families have. This had belonged to George Frederick Cooke, 
who had had it from Mr. Quin, who may have bought it for a 
shilling. Bingley fancied the world was fascinated with its glitter. 

He was reading out of the stage-book — that wonderful stage- 
book — which is not bound like any other book in the world, but 
is rouged and tawdry like the hero or heroine who holds it ; and 
who holds it as people never do hold books : and points with his 
finger to a passage, and wags his head ominously at the audience, 
and then lifts up eyes and finger to the ceiling, professing to de- 
rive some intense consolation from the work between which and 
heaven there is a strong affinity. 

As soon as the Stranger saw the young men, he acted at them ; 
eyeing them solemnly over his gilt volume as he lay on the stage- 
bank, showing his hand, his ring, and his Hessians. He calculated 
the effect that every one of these ornaments would produce upon 
his victims : he was determined to fascinate them, for he knew 
they had paid their money ; and he saw their famihes coming in 
from the country and filling the cane chairs in his boxes. 

As he lay on the bank reading, his servant, Francis, made re- 
marks 'upon his master. 

" Again reading," said Francis, " thus it is from morn to 
night. To him nature has no beauty — life no charm. For three 
years I have never seen him smile" (the gloom of Bingley's face 
was fearful to witness during these comments of the faithful 
domestic). "Nothing diverts him. Oh, if he would but attach 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 151 

himself to any living thing, were it an animal — for something 
man must love." 

\_Enter Tobias ( GoW) from the hut.'] He cries, " O, how re- 
freshing, after seven long weeks, to feel these warm sunbeams 
again. Thanks, bounteous heaven, for the joy I taste ! " He 
presses his cap between his hands, looks up and prays. The 
Stranger eyes him attentively. 

Fraficis to the Stranger. " This old man's share of earthly hap- 
piness can be but little. Yet mark how grateful he is for his portion 
of it." 

Bingley. " Because, though old, he is but a child in the leading- 
string of Hope." (He looks steadily at Foker, who, however, con- 
tinues to suck the top of his stick in an unconcerned manner.) 

Francis. "Hope is the nurse of life." 

Bingley. " And her cradle — is the grave." 

The Stranger uttered this with the moan of a bassoon in agony, and 
fixed his glance on Pendennis so steadily that the poor lad was quite 
put out of countenance. He thought the whole house must be look- 
ing at him and cast his eyes down. As soon as ever he raised them 
Bingley's were at him again. All through the scene the manager 
played at him. How relieved the lad was when the scene ended, 
and Foker, tapping with his cane, cried out, " Bravo, Bingley ! " 

" Give him a hand, Pendennis ; you know every chap likes a 
hand," Mr. Foker said ; and the good-natured young gentleman, 
and Pendennis laughing, and the dragoons in the opposite box, 
began clapping hands to the best of their power. 

A chamber in Wintersen Castle closed over Tobias's hut and the 
Stranger and his boots ; and servants appeared bustling about 
with chairs and tables. — " That's Hicks and Miss Thackthwaite," 
whispered Foker. "Pretty girl, ain't she, Pendennis? But stop 
— hurray — bravo ! here's the Fotheringay." 

The pit thrilled and thumped its umbrellas ; a volley of applause 
was fired from the gallery ; the Dragoon officers and Foker 
clapped their hands furiously : you would have thought the house 
was full, so loud were their plaudits. The red face and ragged 
whiskers of Mr. Costigan were seen peering from the side-scene. 
Pen's eyes opened wide and bright, as Mrs. Haller entered with a 
downcast look, then rallying at the sound of the applause, swept 



152 PENDENNIS FALLS IN LOVE 

the house with a grateful glance, and, folding her hands across her 
breast, sank down in a magnificent curtsey. More applause, more 
umbrellas ; Pen this time, flaming with wine and enthusiasm, 
clapped hands and sang " Bravo " louder than all. Mrs. Haller 
saw him, and everybody else, and old Mr. Bows, the little first 
fiddler of the orchestra (which was this night increased by a de- 
tachment of the band of the dragoons, by the kind permission of 
Colonel Swallowtail), looked up from the desk where he was 
perched, with his crutch beside him, and smiled at the enthusiasm 
of the lad. 

Those who have only seen Miss Fotheringay in later days, since 
her marriage and introduction into London life, have httle 
idea how beautiful a creature she was at the time when our 
friend Pen first set eyes on her. She was of the tallest of women, 
and at her then age of six-and-twenty — for six-and-twenty she 
was, though she vows she was only nineteen — in the prime and 
fulness of her beauty. Her forehead was vast, and her black 
hair waved over it with a natural ripple, and was confined in 
shining and voluminous braids at the back of a neck such as you 
see on the shoulders of the Louvre Venus — that delight of 
gods and men. Her eyes, when she lifted them up to gaze on 
you, and ere she dropped their purple, deep-fringed lids, shone 
with tenderness and mystery unfathomable. Love and Genius 
seemed to look out from them and then retire coyly, as if 
ashamed to have been seen at the lattice. Who could have had 
such a commanding brow but a woman of high intellect? She 
never laughed (indeed her teeth were not good), but a smile of 
endless tenderness and sweetness played round her beautiful lips, 
and in the dimples of her cheeks and her lovely chin. Her nose 
defied description in those days. Her ears were like two little 
pearl shells, which the ear-rings she wore (though the handsomest 
properties in the theatre) only insulted. She was dressed in long, 
flowing robes of black, which she managed and swept to and fro 
with wonderful grace, and out of the folds of which you only saw 
her sandals occasionally ; they were of rather a large size ; but 
Pen thought them as ravishing as the slippers of Cinderella. But 
it was her hand and arm that this magnificent creature most ex- 
celled in, and somehow you could never see her but through 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 153 

them. They surrounded her. When she folded them over her 
bosom in resignation ; when she dropped them in mute agony, or 
raised them in superb command ; when in sportive gaiety her 
hands fluttered and waved before her, like — what shall we say? — 
like the snowy doves before the chariot of Venus — it was with 
these arms and hands that she beckoned, repelled, entreated, 
embraced her admirers — no single one, for she was armed with 
her own virtue, and with her father's valour, whose sword would 
have leapt from its scabbard at any insult offered to his child — 
but the whole house ; which rose to her, as the phrase was, as she 
curtseyed and bowed, and charmed it. 

Thus she stood for a minute — complete and beautiful — as Pen 
stared at her. " I say. Pen, isn't she a stunner? " asked Mr. Foker. 

" Hush ! " Pen said. " She's speaking." 

She began her business in a deep sweet voice. Those who 
know the play of the Stranger are aware that the remarks made 
by the various characters are not valuable in themselves, either for 
their sound or sense, their novelty of observation, or their poetic 
fancy. 

Nobody ever talked so. If we meet idiots in life, as will happen, 
it is a great mercy that they do not use such absurdly fine words. 
The Stranger's talk is sham, like the book he reads, and the hair 
he wears, and the bank he sits on, and the diamond ring he makes 
play with — but, in the midst of the balderdash, there runs that 
reality of love, children, and forgiveness of wrong, which will be 
listened to wherever it is preached, and sets all the world sym- 
pathising. 

With what smothered sorrow, with what gushing pathos, Mrs. 
Haller delivered her part ! At first when, as Count Wintersen's 
housekeeper, and preparing for his Excellency's arrival, she has 
to give orders about the beds and furniture, and the dinner, etc., 
to be got ready, she did so with the calm agony of despair. But 
when she could get rid of the stupid servants, and give vent to 
her feelings to the pit and the house, she overflowed to each indi- 
vidual as if he were her particular confidant, and she was crying 
out her griefs on his shoulder : the little fiddler in the orchestra 
(whom she did not seem to vvatch, though he followed her cease- 
lessly) twitched, twisted, nodded, pointed about, and when she 



154 PENDENNIS FALLS LN LOVE 

came to the favourite passage : " I have a WiUiam, foo, if he be 
still alive — Ah, yes, if he be still alive. His little sisters, too! 
Why, Fancy, dost thou rack me so? Why dost thou image my 
poor children fainting in sickness and crying to — to — their 
mum — um — other" — when she came to this passage little Bows 
buried his face in his blue cotton handkerchief, after crying 
out " Bravo." 

All the house was affected. Foker, for his part, taking out a 
large yellow bandanna, wept piteously. As for Pen, he was gone 
too far for that. He followed the woman about and about — when 
she was off the stage, it and the house were blank ; the lights and 
the red officers reeled wildly before his sight. He watched her 
at the side-scene — where she stood waiting to come on the stage, 
and where her father took off her shawl : when the reconciliation 
arrived, and she flung herself down on Mr. Bingley's shoulders, 
whilst the children clung to their knees, and the Countess (Mrs. 
Bingley) and Baron Steintforth (performed with great liveHness 
and spirit by Garbetts) — while the rest of the characters formed 
a group round them. Pen's hot eyes only saw Fotheringay, Fother- 
ingay. The curtain fell upon him like a pall. He did not hear 
a word of what Bingley said, who came forward to announce 
the play for the next evening, and who took the tumultuous applause, 
as usual, for himself. Pen was not even distinctly aware that the 
house was calling for Miss Fotheringay, nor did the manager seem 
to comprehend that anybody else but himself had caused the 
success of the play. At last he understood it — stepped back 
with a grin, and presently appeared with Mrs. Haller on his arm. 
How beautiful she looked ! Her hair had fallen down, the 
officers threw her flowers. She clutched them to her heart. She 
put back her hair, and smiled all round. Her eyes met Pen's. 
Down went the curtain again ; and she was gone. Not one note 
could he hear of the overture which the brass band of the dra- 
goons blew by kind permission of Colonel Swallowtail. 

"She is a crusher, ain't she, now?" Mr. Foker asked of his 
companion. 

Pen did not know exactly what Foker said, and answered 
vaguely. He could not tell the other what he felt ; he could not 
have spoken, just then, to any mortal. Besides, Pendennis did not 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 1 55 

quite know what he felt yet ; it was something overwhelming, 
maddening, delicious ; a fever of wild joy and undefined longing. 

And now Rowkins and Miss Thackthwaite came on to dance the 
favourite double hornpipe, and Foker abandoned himself to the 
delights of this ballet, just as he had to the tears of the tragedy 
a few minutes before. Pen did not care for it, or indeed think 
about the dance, except to remember that that woman was acting 
with her in the scene where she first came in. It was a mist 
before his eyes. At the end of the dance he looked at his watch 
and said it was time for him to go, 

" Hang it, stay to see The Bravo of the Batfk-Axe" Foker 
said ; " Bingley's splendid in it ; he wears red tights, and has to 
carry Mrs. B. over the Pine-bridge of the Cataract, only she's too 
heavy. It's great fun, do stop." 

Pen looked at the bill with one lingering fond hope that Miss 
Fotheringay's name might be hidden, somewhere, in the list of the 
actors of the after-piece, but there was no such name. Go he 
must. He had a long ride home. He squeezed Foker's hand. 
He was choking to speak, but he couldn't. He quitted the 
theatre and walked frantically about the town, he knew not how 
long ; then he mounted at the George and rode homewards, and 
Clavering clock sang out one as he came into the yard at Fair- 
oaks. The lady of the house might have been awake, but she 
only heard him from the passage outside his room as he dashed 
into bed and pulled the clothes over his head. 



A VOICE FROM THE PAST 

GEORGE ELIOT 

[From chapter 3, book iv, of The Mill on the Floss, i860.] 

Maggie's sense of loneliness and utter privation of joy had 
deepened with the brightness of advancing spring. All the 
favourite outdoor nooks about home, which seemed to have 
done their part with her parents in nurturing and cherishing 
her, were now mixed up with the home-sadness, and gathered 
no smile from the sunshine. Every affection, every delight the 



156 A VOICE FROM THE PAST 

poor child had had, was like an aching nerve to her. There 
was no music for her any more — no piano, no harmonised 
voices, no delicious stringed instruments, with their passionate 
cries of imprisoned spirits sending a strange vibration through 
her frame. And of all her school life there was nothing left 
her now but her little collection of school-books, which she 
turned over with a sickening sense that she knew them all, and 
they were all barren of comfort. Even at school she had often 
wished for books with more in them : everything she learned 
there seemed like the ends of long threads that snapped im- 
mediately. And now — without the indirect charm of school- 
emulation — T^ldmaque was mere bran ; so were the hard dry 
questions on Christian Doctrine : there was no flavour in them — 
no strength. Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been 
contented with absorbing fancies ; if she could have had all 
of Scott's novels and Byron's poems ! — then, perhaps, she 
might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility 
to her actual daily life. And yet — they were hardly what 
she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own, — 
but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted 
some explanation of this hard, real life ; the unhappy-looking 
father, seated at the dull breakfast-table ; the childish, be- 
wildered mother ; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, 
or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure ; 
the need of some tender, demonstrative love ; the cruel sense 
that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that 
they were no longer playfellows together ; the privation of all 
pleasant things that had come to her more than to others : she 
wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and, in 
understanding, endure the heavy weight that had fallen on her 
young heart. If she had been taught " real learning and wis- 
dom, such as great men knew," she thought she should have 
held the secrets of life ; if she had only books, that she might 
learn for herself what wise men knew ! Saints and martyrs had 
never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. ^ She 
knew little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general 
result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision 
against the spread of Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield. 



GEORGE ELIOT I 57 

In one of these meditations, it occurred to her that she had 
forgotten Tom's school-books, which had been sent home in his 
trunk. But she found the stock unaccountably shrunk down to 
the few old ones which had been well thumbed — the Latin 
Dictionary and Grammar, a Delectus, a torn Eutropius, the 
well-worn Virgil, Aldrich's Logic, and the exasperating Euclid. 
Still, Latin, Euclid, and Logic would surely be a considerable 
step in masculine wisdom — in that knowledge which made 
men contented, and even glad to live. Not that the yearning 
for effectual wisdom was quite unmixed : a certain mirage 
would now and then rise on the desert of the future, in which 
she seemed to see herself honoured for her surprising attain- 
ments. And so the poor child, with her soul's hunger and her 
illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit 
of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, 
geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam 
of triumph now and then that her understanding was quite 
equal to these peculiarly masculine studies. For a week or two 
she went on resolutely enough, though with an occasional sink- 
ing of heart, as if she had set out toward the Promised Land 
alone, and found it a thirsty, trackless, uncertain journey. In 
the severity of her early resolution, she would take Aldrich out 
into the fields, and then look off her book toward the sky, where 
the lark was twinkling, or to the reeds and bushes by the river, 
from which the water-fowl rustled forth on its anxious, awkward 
flight — with a startled sense that the relation between Aldrich 
and this living world was extremely remote for her. The dis- 
couragement deepened as the days went on, and the eager heart 
gained faster and faster on the patient mind. Somehow, when 
she sat at the window with her book, her eyes would fix them- 
selves blankly on the outdoor sunshine ; then they would fill 
with tears, and sometimes, if her mother was not in the room, 
the studies would all end in sobbing. She rebelled against her 
lot, she fainted under its loneliness, and fits even of anger and 
hatred toward her father and mother, who were so unlike what 
she would have them to be — toward Tom, who checked her 
and met her thought or feeling always by some thwarting differ- 
ence — would flow out over affections and conscience like a 



158 A VOICE FROM THE PAST 

lava-stream, and frighten her with a sense that it was not 
difficult for her to become a demon. Then her brain would be 
busy with wild romances of flight from home in search of some- 
thing less sordid and dreary ; she would go to some great man 
— Walter Scott, perhaps — and tell him how wretched and how 
clever she was, and he would surely do something for her. But, 
in the middle of her vision, her father would perhaps enter the 
room for the evening, and, surprised that she still sat without no- 
ticing him, would say, complainingly : " Come, am I to fetch my 
slippers myself ? " The voice pierced through Maggie like a 
sword ; there was another sadness besides her own, and she 
had been thinking of turning her book on it and forsaking it. 

This afternoon the sight of Bob's cheerful freckled face had 
given her discontent a new direction. She thought it was part 
of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the bur- 
then of larger wants than others seemed to feel — that she had 
to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, what- 
ever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth. She wished 
she could have been like Bob, with his easily satisfied ignorance, 
or like Tom, who had something to do on which he could fix 
his mind with a steady purpose, and disregard everything 
else. Poor child ! as she leaned her head against the window- 
frame, with her hands clasped tighter and tighter, and her foot 
beating the ground, she was as lonely in her trouble as if she 
had been the only girl in the civilised world of that day who 
had come out of her school-life with a soul untrained for inevi- 
table struggles — with no other part of her inherited share in the 
hard-won treasures of thought, which generations of painful toil 
have laid up for the race of men, than shreds and patches of 
feeble literature and false history — with much futile informa- 
tion about Saxon and other kings of doubtful example — but 
happily quite without that knowledge of the irreversible laws 
within and without her, which, governing the habits, becomes 
morality, and, developing the feelings of submission and depen- 
dence, becomes religion : — as lonely in her trouble as if every 
other girl besides herself had been cherished and watched over 
by elder minds, not forgetful of their own early time, when need 
was keen and impulse strong. 



GEORGE ELIOT 1 59 

At last Maggie's eyes glanced down on the books that lay on 
the window-shelf, and she half forsook her reverie to turn over 
listlessly the leaves of the Portrait Gallery ; but she soon pushed 
this aside to examine the little row of books tied together with 
string. Beauties of the Spectator, Rasselas, Economy of Human 
Life, Gregory s Letters — she knew the sort of matter that was 
inside all these : the Christian Year — that seemed to be a hymn- 
book, and she laid it down again ; but Thomas a Kempis ? — the 
name had come across her in her reading, and she felt the satis- 
faction, which every one knows, of getting some idea to attach to 
a name that strays solitary in the memory. She took up the little, 
old, clumsy book with some curiosity : it had the corners turned 
down in many places, and some hand, now for ever quiet, had 
made at certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks, long since 
browned by time. Maggie turned from leaf to leaf, and read 
where the quiet hand pointed — " Know that the love of thyself 
doth hurt thee more than anything in the world ... If thou 
seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy 
own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from 
care : for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every 
place there will be some that will cross thee. . . . Both 
above and below, which way soever thou dost turn thee, every- 
where thou shalt find the Cross : and everywhere of necessity 
thou must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace, and 
enjoy an everlasting crown. ... If thou desire to mount unto 
this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the axe to 
the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inor- 
dinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly 
good. On this sin, that a man inordinately loveth himself, 
almost all dependeth, whatsoever is thoroughly to be overcome ; 
which evil being once overcome and subdued, there will pres- 
ently ensue great peace and tranquillity. ... It is but little 
thou sufferest in comparison of them that have suffered so much, 
were so strongly tempted, so grievously afflicted, so many ways 
tried and exercised. Thou oughtest therefore to call to mind 
the more heavy sufferings of others, that thou mayest the easier 
bear thy little adversities. And if they seem not little unto thee, 
beware lest thy impatience be the cause thereof. . . . Blessed 



l60 A VOICE FROM THE PAST 

are those ears that receive the whispers of the divine voice, and 
listen not to the whisperings of the world. Blessed are those 
ears which hearken not unto the voice which soundeth outwardly, 
but unto the Truth, which teaches inwardly — " 

A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, 
as if she had been awakened in the night by a strain of solemn 
music, telling of beings whose souls had been astir while hers 
was in stupour. She went on from one brown mark to another, 
where the quiet hand seemed to point, hardly conscious that 
she was reading — seeming rather to listen while a low voice 
said — 

" Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place 
of thy rest? In heaven ought to be thy dwelling, and all earthly 
things are to be looked on as they forward thy journey thither. 
All things pass away, and thou together with them. Beware thou 
cleave not unto them, lest thou be entangled and perish. . . . 
If a man should give all his substance, yet it is as nothing. And 
if he should attain to all knowledge, he is yet far off. And if he 
should be of great virtue, and very fervent devotion, yet is 
there much wanting ; to wit, one thing, which is most necessary 
for him. What is that ? That having left all, he leave himself, 
and go wholly out of himself, and retain nothing of self-love. 
... I have often said unto thee, and now again I say the same. 
Forsake thyself, resign thyself, and thou shalt enjoy much 
inward peace. . . . Then shall all vain imaginations, evil per- 
turbations, and superfluous cares fly away ; then shall immoder- 
ate fear leave thee, and inordinate love shall die." 

Maggie drew a long breath and pushed her heavy hair back, 
as if to see a sudden vision more clearly. Here, then, was a 
secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets 
—here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of 
outward things — here was insight, and strength, and conquest, 
to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a 
supreme Teacher was waiting to be heard. It flashed through 
her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a problem, that 
all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart 
on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity of the 
universe ; and for the first time she saw the possibility of shift- 



. GEORGE ELIOT l6l 

ing the position from which she looked at the gratification of 
her own desires — of taking her stand out of herself, and looking 
at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely-guided 
whole. She read on and on in the old book, devouring eagerly 
the dialogues with the invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, 
the source of all strength ; returning to it after she had been called 
away, and reading till the sun went down behind the willows. 
With all the hurry of an imagination that could never rest in 
the present, she sat in the deepening twilight forming plans of 
self-humiliation and entire devotedness ; and, in the ardour of 
first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance into 
that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. 
She had not perceived — how could she until she had lived 
longer? — the inmost truth of the old monk's outpourings, that 
renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly. 
Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy be- 
cause she had found the key to it. She knew nothing of doc- 
trines and systems — of mysticism or quietism ; but this voice 
out of the far-off middle ages was the direct communication 
of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to Maggie as 
an unquestioned message. 

I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned 
book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, 
works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness : 
while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all 
things as they were before. It was written down by a hand 
that waited for the heart's prompting ; it is the chronicle of a 
solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph — not writ- 
ten on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are 
treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains 
to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consola- 
tions : the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered 
and renounced — in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and 
tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a 
fashion of speech different from ours — but under the same silent 
far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same 
strivings, the same failures, the same weariness. 

In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to 



1 62 A VOICE FROM THE PAST 

fall into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the 
tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only 
of an extremely moderate kind, but are always presupposed, no 
objects being eligible but such as can be touched with a light 
and graceful irony. But then, good society has its claret and 
its velvet carpets, its dinner-engagements six weeks deep, its 
opera and its faery ballrooms ; rides off its ennui on thorough- 
bred horses, lounges at the club, has to keep clear of crinoline 
vortices, gets its science done by Faraday, and its religion by 
the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses : how 
should it have time or need for belief and emphasis ? But good 
society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very 
expensive production ; requiring nothing less than a wide and ar- 
duous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, 
cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, ham- 
mering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid — 
or else, spread over sheep-walks, and scattered in lonely houses 
and huts on the clayey or chalky corn-lands, where the rainy days 
look dreary. This wide national life is based entirely on em- 
phasis — the emphasis of want, which urges it into all the ac- 
tivities necessary for the maintenance of good society and light 
irony : it spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted 
fashion, amid family discord unsoftened by long corridors. 
Under such circumstances, there are many among its myriads 
of souls who have absolutely needed an emphatic belief : life in 
this unpleasurable shape demanding some solution even to un- 
speculative minds ; just as you inquire into the stuffing of your 
couch when anything galls you there, whereas eider-down and 
perfect French springs excite no question. Some have an em- 
phatic belief in alcohol, and seek their ekstasis or outside stand- 
ing-ground in gin ; but the rest require something that good 
society calls " enthusiasm," something that will present motive 
in an entire absence of high prizes, something that will give 
patience and feed human love when the limbs ache with weari- 
ness, and human looks are hard upon us — something, clearly, 
that lies outside personal desires, that includes resignation for 
ourselves and active love for what is not ourselves. Now and 
then, that sort of enthusiasm finds a far-echoing voice that 



GEORGE ELIOT 1 63 

comes from an experience springing out of the deepest need. 
And it was by being brought within the long lingering vibra- 
tions of such a voice that Maggie, with her girl's face and 
unnoted sorrows, found an effort and a hope that helped her 
through years of loneliness, making out a faith for herself with- 
out the aid of established authorities and appointed guides — for 
they were not at hand, and her need was pressing. From what 
you know of her, you will not be surprised that she threw some 
exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even 
into her self-renunciation : her own life was still a drama for 
her, in which she demanded of herself that her part should 
be played with intensity. And so it came to pass that she often 
lost the spirit of humility by being excessive in the outward act ; 
she often strove after too high a flight, and came down with her 
poor little half-fledged wings dabbled in the mud. For example, 
she not only determined to work at plain sewing, that she might 
contribute something towards the fund in the tin box, but she 
went, in the first instance, in her zeal of self-mortification, to 
ask for it at a linen shop in St. Ogg's, instead of getting it in a 
more quiet and indirect way ; and could see nothing but what 
was entirely wrong and unkind, nay, persecuting, in Tom's 
reproof of her for this unnecessary act. " I don't like my 
sister to do such things," said Tom ; " /'// take care that the 
debts are paid, without your lowering yourself in that way." 
Surely there was some tenderness and bravery mingled with 
the worldliness and self-assertion of that little speech ; but 
Maggie held it as dross, overlooking the grains of gold, and took 
Tom's rebuke as one of her outward crosses. Tom was very 
hard to her, she used to think, in her long night-watchings — to 
her who had always loved him so ; and then she strove to be 
contented with that hardness, and to require nothing. That is 
the path we all like when we set out on our abandonment of 
egoism — the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the 
palm-branches grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, 
just allowance, and self-blame, where there are no leafy honours 
to be gathered and worn. 

The old books, Virgil, Euclid, and Aldrich — that wrinkled 
fruit of the tree of knowledge — had been all laid by ; for Maggie 



l64 A VOICE FROM THE PAST 

had turned her back on the vain ambition to share the thoughts 
of the wise. In her first ardour she flung away the books with a 
sort of triumph that she had risen above the need of them ; and 
if they had been her own, she would have burned them, be- 
lieving that she would never repent. She read so eagerly and 
constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas a Kempis, and 
the Christian Year (no longer rejected as a " hymn-book "), that 
they filled her mind with a constant stream of rhythmic memo- 
ries ; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and 
life in the light of her new faith to need any other material for 
her mind to work on, as she sat with her well-plied needle, mak- 
ing shirts and other complicated stitchings falsely called "plain" 
— by no means plain to Maggie, since wristband and sleeve 
and the like had a capability of being sewed in wrong side out- 
ward in moments of mental wandering. 

Hanging diligently over her sewing, Maggie was a sight any 
one might have been pleased to look at. That new inward life 
of hers, notwithstanding some volcanic upheavings of impris- 
oned passions, yet shone out in her face with a tender soft light 
that mingled itself as added loveliness with the gradual en- 
riched colour and outline of her blossoming youth. Her mother 
felt the change in her with a sort of puzzled wonder that Maggie 
should be " growing up so good ; " it was amazing that this once 
" contrary " child was become so submissive, so backward to 
assert her own will. Maggie used to look up from her work 
and find her mother's eyes fixed upon her: they were watching 
and waiting for the large young glance, as if her elder frame got 
some needful warmth from it. The mother was getting fond of 
her tall, brown girl, the only bit of furniture now on which she 
could bestow her anxiety and pride ; and Maggie, in spite of her 
own ascetic wish to have no personal adornment, was obliged to 
give way to her mother about her hair, and submit to have the 
abundant black locks plaited into a coronet on the summit of 
her head, after the pitiable fashion of those antiquated times. 

" Let your mother have that bit o' pleasure, my dear," said 
Mrs. Tulliver ; " I'd trouble enough with your hair once." 

So Maggie, glad of anything that would soothe her mother, 
and cheer their long day together, consented to the vain decora- 



GEORGE ELIOT 165 

tion, and showed a queenly head above her old frocks — steadily 
refusing, however, to look at herself in the glass. Mrs. Tulliver 
liked to call the father's attention to Maggie's hair and other 
unexpected virtues, but he had a brusque reply to give. 

" I knew well^enough what she'd be, before now — it's nothing 
new to me. But it's a pity she isn't made o' commoner stuff ; 
she'll be thrown away, I doubt : there'll be nobody to marry her 
as is fit for her." 

And Maggie's graces of mind and body fed his gloom. He sat 
patiently enough while she read him a chapter, or said something 
timidly when they were alone together about trouble being turned 
into a blessing. He took it all as part of his daughter's goodness, 
which made his misfortune the sadder to him because they dam- 
aged her chance in life. In a mind charged with an eager pur- 
pose and an unsatisfied vindictiveness, there is no room for new 
feelings : Mr. Tulliver did not want spiritual consolation — he 
wanted to shake off the degradation of debt, and to have his 
revenge. 

AN IMPETUOUS LOVER 

GEORGE MEREDITH 

[From chapters 8-10 of Beauchanip's Career, 1875. Nevil Beauchamp, 
a young officer in the English navy, is deeply in love with Renee, the sister of 
Roland, a young French officer, his intimate friend. She is, however, betrothed 
to the marquis, who is much older than she. The scene is in Venice.] 

The marquis was clad in a white silken suit, and a dash of red 
round the neck set off his black beard ; but when he lifted his 
broad straw hat, a baldness of sconce shone. There was ele- 
gance in his gestures ; he looked a gentleman, though an ultra- 
Gallican one, that is, too scrupulously finished for our taste, 
smelling of the valet. He had the habit of balancing his body 
on the hips, as if to emphasize a juvenile vigour, and his general 
attitude suggested an idea that he had an oration for you. Seen 
from a distance, his baldness and strong nasal projection were 
not winning features ; the youthful standard he had evidently 
prescribed to himself in his dress and his ready jerks of acqui- 



1 66 AN IMPETUOUS LOVER 

escence and delivery might lead a forlorn rival to conceive him 
something of an Ogre straining at an Adonis. It could not be 
disputed that he bore his disappointment remarkably well ; the 
more laudably, because his position was within a step of the 
ridiculous, for he had shot himself to the mark, despising sleep, 
heat, dust, dirt, diet, and lo, that charming object was delib- 
erately slipping out of reach, proving his headlong journey an 
absurdity. As he stood declining to participate in the lunatic 
voyage, and bidding them perforce good speed off the tip of his 
fingers, Ren^e turned her eyes on him, and away. She felt a 
little smart of pity, arising partly from her antagonism to Ro- 
land's covert laughter ; but it was the colder kind of feminine 
pity, which is nearer to contempt than to tenderness. She sat 
still, placid outwardly, in fear of herself, so strange she found it 
to be borne out to sea by her sailor lover under the eyes of her 
betrothed. She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensa- 
tions, none of them of a very healthy kind, coming as it were 
from an unlocked chamber of her bosom, hitherto of unimagined 
contents ; and the marquis being now on the spot to defend his 
own, she no longer blamed Nevil : it was otherwise utterly. All 
the sweeter side of pity was for him. He was at first amazed by 
the sudden exquisite transition. Tenderness breathed from her, 
in voice, in look, in touch ; for she accepted his help that he 
might lead her to the stern of the vessel, to gaze well on setting 
Venice, and sent lightnings up his veins ; she leaned beside him 
over the vessel's rails, not separated from him by the breadth of 
a fluttering riband. Like him, she scarcely heard her brother 
when he for an instant intervened, and with Nevil she said adieu 
to Venice, where the faint red Doge's palace was like the fading 
of another sunset northwestward of the glory along the hills. 
Venice dropped lower and lower, breasting the waters, until it 
was a thin line in air. The line was broken, and ran in dots, 
with h^re and there a pillar standing on opal sky. At last the 
topmost campanile sank. 

Renee looked up at the sails, and back for the submerged 
city. 

" It is gone 1 " she said, as though a marvel had been worked ; 
and swiftly : " we have one night 1 " 



GEORGE MEREDITH 1 6/ 

She breathed it half like a question, like a petition, catching 
her breath. The adieu to Venice was her assurance of liberty, 
but Venice hidden rolled on her the sense of the return and 
plucked shrewdly at her tether of bondage. 

They set their eyes toward the dark gulf ahead. The night 
was growing starry. The softly ruffled Adriatic tossed no foam. 

" One night ? " said Nevil ; " one ? Why only one ? " 

Ren^e shuddered. " Oh ! do not speak." 

" Then, give me your hand." 

" There, my friend." 

He pressed a hand that was like a quivering chord. She gave 
it as though it had been his own to claim. But that it meant no 
more than a hand he knew by the very frankness of her com- 
pliance, in the manner natural to her ; and this was the charm, 
it filled him with her peculiar image and spirit, and while he 
held it he was subdued. 

Lying on the deck at midnight, wrapt in his cloak and a coil 
of rope for a pillow, considerably apart from jesting Roland, the 
recollection of that little sanguine spot of time when Rente's 
life-blood ran with his, began to heave under him like a swelling 
sea. For Nevil the starred black night was Ren^e. Half his 
heart was in it ; but the combative division flew to the morning 
and the deadly iniquity of the marriage, from which he resolved 
to save her ; in pure devotedness, he believed. And so he closed 
his eyes. She, a girl, with a heart fluttering open and fearing, 
felt only that she had lost herself somewhere, and she had 
neither sleep nor symbols, nothing but a sense of infinite 
strangeness, as though she were borne superhumanly through 
space. 

The breeze blew steadily, enough to swell the sails and sweep 
the vessel on smoothly. The night air dropped no moisture on 
deck. 

Nevil Beauchamp dozed for an hour. He was awakened by 
light on his eyelids, and starting up beheld the many pinnacles 
of grey and red rocks and shadowy high white regions at the 
head of the gulf waiting for the sun ; and the sun struck them. 
One by one they came out in crimson flame, till the vivid host 
appeared to have stepped forward. The shadows on the snow- 



1 68 AN IMPETUOUS LOVER 

fields deepened to purple below an irradiation of rose and pink 
and dazzling silver. There of all the world you might imagine 
gods to sit. A crowd of mountains endless in range, erect, or 
flowing, shattered and arid, or leaning in smooth lustre, hangs 
above the gulf. The mountains are sovereign Alps, and the sea 
is beneath them. The whole gigantic body keeps the sea, as 
with a hand, to right and left. 

Nevil's personal rapture craved for Ren^e with the second 
long breath he drew ; and now the curtain of her tent-cabin 
parted, and greeting him with a half smile, she looked out. 
The Adriatic was dark, the Alps had heaven to themselves. 
Crescents and hollows, rosy mounds, white shelves, shining 
ledges, domes and peaks, all the towering heights were in illu- 
mination from Friuli into farthest Tyrol ; beyond earth to the 
stricken sense of the gazers. Colour was steadfast on the mas- 
sive front ranks : it wavered in the remoteness, and was quick 
and dim as though it fell on beating wings ; but there too 
divine colour seized and shaped forth solid forms, and thence 
away to others in uttermost distances where the incredible flick- 
ering gleam of new heights arose, that soared, or stretched their 
white uncertain curves in sky-like wings traversing infinity. 

It seemed unlike morning to the lovers, but as if night had 
broken with a revelation of the kingdom in the heart of night. 
While the broad smooth waters rolled unlighted beneath that 
transfigured upper sphere, it was possible to think the scene 
might vanish like a view caught out of darkness by lightning. 
Alp over burning Alp, and around them a hueless dawn ! The 
two exulted ; they threw off the load of wonderment, and in 
looking they had the delicious sensation of flight in their veins. 

Ren^e stole toward Nevil. She was mystically shaken and 
at his mercy; and had he said then, " Over to the other land, 
away from Venice ! " she would have bent her head. 

She ' asked his permission to rouse her brother and madame, 
so that they should not miss the scene. 

Roland lay in the folds of his military greatcoat, too com- 
pletely happy to be disturbed, Nevil Beauchamp chose to think ; 
and Rosamund Culling, he told Ren^e, had been separated from 
her husband last on these waters. 



GEORGE MEREDITH 1 69 

" Ah ! to be unhappy here," sighed Rende. " I fancied it 
when I begged her to join us. It was in her voice." 

The impressionable girl trembled. He knew he was dear to 
her, and for that reason, judging of her by himself, he forbore 
to urge his advantage, conceiving it base to fear that loving him 
she could yield her hand to another ; and it was the critical 
instant. She was almost in his grasp. A word of sharp en- 
treaty would have swung her round to see her situation with his 
eyes, and detest and shrink from it. He committed the capital 
fault of treating her as his equal in passion and courage, not as 
metal ready to run into the mould under temporary stress of 
fire. 

Even later in the morning, when she was cooler, and he had 
come to speak, more than her own strength was needed to resist 
him. The struggle was hard. The boat's head had been put 
about for Venice, and they were among the dusky-red Chioggian 
sails in fishing quarters, expecting momently a campanile to sig- 
nal the sea-city over the level. Ren^e waited for it in suspense. 
To her it stood for the implacable key of a close and stifling 
chamber, so different from this brilliant boundless region of air, 
that she sickened with the apprehension ; but she knew it must 
appear, and soon, and therewith the contraction and the gloom 
it indicated to her mind. He talked of the beauty. She fretted 
at it, and was her petulant self again in an epigrammatic note 
of discord. 

He let that pass. 

" Last night you said ' one night,' " he whispered. " We will 
have another sail before we leave Venice." 

" One night, and in a little time one hour ! and next one min- 
ute ! and there's the end," said Renee. 

Her tone alarmed him. " Have you forgotten that you gave 
me your hand ? " 

" I gave my hand to my friend." 

" You gave it to me for good." 

" No ; I dared not ; it is not mine." 

" It is mine," said Beauchamp. 

Ren^e pointed to the dots and severed lines and isolated col- 
umns of the rising city, black over bright sea. 



I/O AN IMPETUOUS LOVER 

" Mine there as well as here," said Beauchamp, and looked at 
her with the fiery zeal of eyes intent on minutest signs for a con- 
firmation, to shake that sad negation of her face. 

" Ren^e, you cannot break the pledge of the hand you gave 
me last night." 

" You tell me how weak a creature I am." 
, " You are me, myself ; more, better than me. And say, would 
you not rather coast here and keep the city under water ? " 

She could not refrain from confessing that she would be glad 
never to land there. 

" So, when you land, go straight to your father," said Beau- 
champ, to whose conception it was a simple act resulting from 
the avowal. 

" Oh ! you torture me," she cried. Her eyelashes were heavy 
with tears. "I cannot do it. Think what you will of me! 
And, my friend, help me. Should you not help me ? I have 
not once actually disobeyed my father, and he has indulged me, 
but he has been sure of me as a dutiful girl. That is my source 
of self-respect. My friend can always be my friend." 

" Yes, while it's not too late," said Beauchamp. 

She observed a sudden stringing of his features. He called 
to the chief boatman, made his command intelligible to that 
portly capitano, and went on to Roland, who was puffing his 
after-breakfast cigarette in conversation with the tolerant Eng- 
lish lady. 

" You condescend to notice us, signor ? " said Roland. " The 
vessel is up to some manoeuvre ? " 

" We have decided not to land," replied Beauchamp. " And, 
Roland," he checked the Frenchman's shout of laughter, " I 
think of making for Trieste. Let me speak to you, to both. 
Ren^e is in misery. She must not go back." 

Roland sprang to his feet, stared, and walked over to 
Ren^el 

" Nevil," said Rosamond Culling, " do you know what you are 
doing ? " 

" Perfectly," said he. " Come to her. She is a girl, and I 
must think and act for her." 

Roland met them. 



GEORGE MEREDITH j^i 

" My dear Nevil, are you in a state of delusion ? Ren^e 
denies . . ." 

" There's no delusion, Roland. I am determined to stop a 
catastrophe. I see it as plainly as those Alps. There is only 
one way, and that's the one I have chosen." 

" Chosen ! my friend. But allow me to remind you that you 
have others to consult. And Ren^e herself . . ." 

" She is a girl. She loves me, and I speak for her." 

" She has said it ? " 

" She has more than said it." 

" You strike me to the deck, Nevil. Either you are down- 
right mad — which seems the Hkeliest,or we are all in a nightmare. 
Can you suppose I will let my sister be carried away the deuce 
knows where, while her father is expecting her, and to fulfil an 
engagement affecting his pledged word .'' " 

Beauchamp simply replied — 

"Come to her." 

The four sat together under the shadow of the helmsman, by 
whom they were regarded as voyagers in debate upon the ques- 
tion of some hours further on salt water. " No bora," he threw 
in at intervals, to assure them that the obnoxious wind of the 
Adriatic need not disturb their calculations. 

It was an extraordinary sitting, but none of the parties to it 
thought of it so when Nevil Beauchamp had plunged them into 
it. He compelled them, even Ren^e — and she would have 
flown had there been wings on her shoulders — to feel some- 
thing of the life and death issues present to his soul, and submit 
to the discussion, in plain language of the market-place, of the 
most delicate of human subjects for her, for him, and hardly less 
for the other two. An overmastering fervour can do this. It 
upsets the vessel we float in, and we have to swim our way out 
of deep waters by the directest use of the natural faculties, with- 
out much reflection on the change in our habits. To others not 
under such an influence the position seems impossible. This 
discussion occurred. Beauchamp opened the case in a couple 
of sentences, and when the turn came for Ren^e to speak, and 
she shrank from the task in manifest pain, he spoke for her, 
and no one heard her contradiction. She would have wished 



1/2 AN IMPETUOUS LOVER 

the fearful impetuous youth to succeed if she could have slept 
through the storm he was rousing. 

Roland appealed to her. " You ! my sister, it is you that 
consent to this wild freak, enough to break your father's heart ? " 

He had really forgotten his knowledge of her character — 
what much he knew — in the dust of the desperation flung about 
her by Nevil Beauchamp. 

She shook her head ; she had not consented. 

" The man she loves is her voice and her will," said Beau- 
champ. " She gives me her hand and I lead her." 

Roland questioned her. It could not be denied that she had 
given her hand, and her bewildered senses made her think that 
it had been with an entire abandonment ; and in the heat of her 
conflict of feelings, the deliciousness of yielding to him curled 
round and enclosed her, as in a cool humming sea-shell. 

" Ren^e ! " said Roland. 

" Brother ! " she cried. 

" You see that I cannot suffer you to be borne away." 

" No ; do not ! " 

But the boat was flying fast from Venice, and she could have 
fallen at his feet and kissed them for not countermanding it. 

" You are in my charge, my sister," 

" Yes." 

" And now, Nevil, between us two," said Roland. 

Beauchamp required no challenge. He seemed, to Rosamund 
Culling, twice older than he was, strangely adept, yet more 
strangely wise of worldly matters, and eloquent too. But it was 
the eloquence of frenzy, madness, in Roland's ear. The arro- 
gation of a terrible foresight that harped on present and future 
to persuade him of the righteousness of this headlong proceed- 
ing advocated by his friend, vexed his natural equanimity. The 
argument was out of the domain of logic. He could hardly sit 
to listen, and tore at his moustache at each end. Nevertheless 
his sister listened. The mad Englishman accomplished the 
miracle of making her listen, and appear to consent. 

Roland laughed scornfully. . " Why Trieste? I ask you, why 
Trieste ? You can't have a Catholic priest at your bidding, 
without her father's sanction." 



GEORGE MEREDITH 1 73 

"We leave Ren^e at Trieste, under the care of madame," 
said Beauchamp, " and we return to Venice, and I go to your 
father. This method protects Ren^e from annoyance." 

"It strikes me that if she arrives at any determination she 
must take the consequences." 

" She does. She is brave enough for that. But she is a girl ; 
she has to fight the battle of her life in a day, and I am her 
lover, and she leaves it to me." 

" Is my sister such a coward ? " said Roland. 

Ren^e could only call out his name. 

" It will never do, my dear Nevil ; " Roland tried to deal with 
his unreasonable friend affectionately. " I am responsible for 
her. It's your own fault — if you had not saved my life I should 
not have been in your way. Here I am, and your proposition 
can't be heard of. Do as you will, both of you, when you step 
ashore in Venice." 

" If she goes back she is lost," said Beauchamp, and he 
attacked Roland on the side of his love for Renee, and for him. 

Roland was inflexible. Seeing which, Ren^e said, " To 
Venice, quickly, my brother ! " and now she almost sighed with 
relief to think that she was escaping from this hurricane of 
a youth, who swept her off her feet and wrapt her whole being 
in a delirium. 

" We were in sight of the city just now ! " cried Roland, 
staring and frowning. " What's this ? " 

Beauchamp answered him calmly, " The boat's under my 
orders." 

" Talk madness, but don't act it," said Roland. " Round 
with the boat at once. Hundred devils ! you haven't your wits." 

To his amazement, Beauchamp refused to alter the boat's 
present course. 

" You heard my sister? " said Roland. 

" You frighten her," said Beauchamp. 

" You heard her wish to return to Venice, I say." 

" She has no wish that is not mine." 

It came to Roland's shouting his command to the men, while 
Beauchamp pointed the course on for them. 

" You will make this a ghastly pleasantry," said Roland. 



174 A^ IMPETUOUS LOVER 

" I do what I know to be right," said Beauchamp. 

" You want an altercation before these fellows ? " 

" There won't be one ; they obey me." 

Roland blinked rapidly in wrath and doubt of mind. 

" Madame," he stooped to Rosamund Culling, with a happy 
inspiration, " convince him ; you have known him longer than 
I, and I desire not to lose my friend. And tell me, madame — 
I can trust you to be truth itself, and you can see it is actually 
the time for truth to be spoken — is he justified in taking my 
sister's hand ? You perceive that I am obliged to appeal to 
you. Is he not dependent on his uncle ? And is he not, there- 
fore, in your opinion, bound in reason as well as in honour to 
wait for his uncle's approbation before he undertakes to speak 
for my sister ? And, since the occasion is urgent, let me ask you 
one thing more : whether, by your knowledge of his position, you 
think him entitled to presume to decide upon my sister's des- 
tiny ? She, you are aware, is not so young but that she can 
speak for herself. . . ." 

" There you are wrong, Roland," said Beauchamp ; " she can 
neither speak nor think for herself: you lead her blindfolded." 

" And you, my friend, suppose that you are wiser than any of 
us. It is understood. I venture to appeal to madame on the 
point in question." 

The poor lady's heart beat dismally. She was constrained to 
answer, and said, "His uncle is one who must be consulted." 

" You hear that, Nevil," said Roland. 

Beauchamp looked at her sharply ; angrily, Rosamund feared. 
She had struck his hot brain with the vision of Everard Romfrey 
as with a bar of iron. If Rosamund had inclined to the view 
that he was sure of his uncle's support, it would have seemed 
to him a simple confirmation of his sentiments, but he was not 
of the same temper now as when he exclaimed, " Let him see 
her ! " and could imagine, give him only Rente's love, the world 
of men subservient to his wishes. 

Then he was dreaming ; he was now in fiery earnest, for that 
reason accessible to facts presented to him ; and Rosamund's 
reluctantly spoken words brought his stubborn uncle before his 
eyes, inflicting a sense of helplessness of the bitterest kind. 



GEORGE MEREDITH 1 75 

They were all silent. Beauchamp stared at the lines of the 
deck-planks. 

His scheme to rescue Ren^e was right and good ; but was he 
the man that should do it ? And was she, moreover, he thought, 
speculating on her bent head, the woman to be forced to brave 
the world with him, and poverty ? She gave him no sign. He 
was assuredly not the man to pretend to powers he did not feel 
himself to possess, and though from a personal, and still more 
from a lover's, inability to see all round him at one time and 
accurately to weigh the forces at his disposal, he had gone far, 
he was not a wilful dreamer nor so very selfish a lover. The 
instant his consciousness of a superior strength failed him he 
acknowledged it. 

Renee did not look up. She had none of those lightnings of 
primitive energy, nor the noble rashness and reliance on her 
lover, which his imagination had filled her with ; none. That 
was plain. She could not even venture to second him. Had 
she done so he would have held out. He walked to the head 
of the boat without replying. 

Soon after this the boat was set for Venice again. 



THE CIVIL WAR 

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 

[From chapter i of The History of Englafid from the Accession of James 
the Second, 1848.] 

In August 1642 the sword was at length drawn; and soon, in 
almost every shire of the kingdom, two hostile factions appeared 
in arms against each other. It is not easy to say which of the 
contending parties was at first the more formidable. The Houses 
commanded London and the counties round London, the fleet, 
the navigation of the Thames, and most of the large towns and 
seaports. They had at their disposal almost all the military stores 
of the kingdom, and were able to raise duties, both on goods im- 
ported from foreign countries, and on some important products 
of domestic industry. The King was ill provided with artillery 



1/6 THE CIVIL WAR 

and ammunition. The taxes which he laid on the rural districts 
occupied by his troops produced, it is probable, a sum far less 
than that which the Parliament drew from the city of London 
alone. He relied, indeed, chiefly, for pecuniary aid, on the mu- 
nificence of his opulent adherents. Many of these mortgaged their 
land, pawned their jewels, and ^roke up their silver chargers and 
christening bowls, in order to assist him. But experience has 
fully proved that the voluntary liberality of individuals, even in 
times of the greatest excitement, is a poor financial resource when 
compared with severe and methodical taxation, which presses on 
the willing and unwilling alike. 

Charles, however, had one advantage, which, if he had used 
it well, would have more than compensated for the want of 
stores and money, and which, notwithstanding his mismanage- 
ment, gave him, during some months, a superiority in the war. 
His troops at first fought much better than those of the Parlia- 
ment. Both armies, it is true, were almost entirely composed of 
men who had never seen a field of battle. Nevertheless, the dif- 
ference was great. The parliamentary ranks were filled with hire- 
lings whom want and idleness had induced to enlist. Hampden's 
regiment was regarded as one of the best ; and even Hampden's 
regiment was described by Cromwell as a mere rabble of tapsters 
and serving men out of place. The royal army, on the other 
hand, consisted in great part of gentlemen, high spirited, ardent, 
accustomed to consider dishonour as more terrible than death, 
accustomed to fencing, to the use of fire arms, to bold riding, and 
to manly and perilous sport, which has been well called the image 
of war. Such gentlemen, mounted on their favourite horses, and 
commanding little bands, composed of their younger brothers, 
grooms, gamekeepers and huntsmen, were, from the very first day 
on which they took the field, qualified to play their part with 
credit in a skirmish. The steadiness, the prompt obedience, the 
mechanical precision of movement, which are characteristic of the 
regular soldier, these gallant volunteers never attained. But they 
were at first opposed to enemies as undisciplined as themselves, 
and far less active, athletic, and daring. For a time, therefore, the 
Cavaliers were successful in almost every encounter. 

The Houses had also been unfortunate in the choice of a gen- 



THOMAS BASING TON AfACAULAY 1 77 

eral. The rank and wealth of the Earl of Essex made him one 
of the most important members of the parliamentary party. He 
had borne arms on the Continent with credit, and, when the war 
began, had as high a military reputation as any man in the coun- 
try. But it soon appeared that he was unfit for the post of 
Commander in Chief. He had little energy and no originality. 
The methodical tactics which he had learned in the war of the 
Palatinate did not save him from being surprised and baffled by 
such a Captain as Rupert, who could claim no higher fame than 
that of an enterprising partisan. 

Nor were the officers who held the chief commissions under 
Essex qualified to supply what was wanting in him. For this, 
indeed, the Houses are scarcely to be blamed. In a country 
which had not, within the memory of the oldest person living, 
made war on a great scale by land, generals of tried skill and valour 
were not to be found. It was necessary, therefore, in the first 
instance, to trust untried men ; and the preference was naturally 
given to men distinguished either by their station, or by the abiU- 
ties which they had displayed in parliament. In scarcely a sin- 
gle instance, however, was the selection fortunate. Neither the 
grandees nor the orators proved good soldiers. The Earl of 
Stamford, one of the greatest nobles of England, was routed by the 
Royalists at Stratton. Nathaniel Fiennes, inferior to none of his 
contemporaries in talents for civil business, disgraced himself by 
the pusillanimous surrender of Bristol. Indeed, of all the states- 
men who at this juncture accepted high military commands, 
Hampden alone appears to have carried into the camp the capac- 
ity and strength of mind which had made him eminent in politics. 

When the war had lasted a year, the advantage was decidedly 
with the Royalists. They were victorious, both in the western 
and in the northern counties. They had wrested Bristol, the 
second city in the kingdom, from the Parliament. They had won 
several battles, and had not sustained a single serious or ignomini- 
ous defeat. Among the Roundheads adversity had begun to pro- 
duce dissension and discontent. The Parliament was kept in 
alarm, sometimes by plots, and sometimes by riots. It was thought 
necessarv to fortify London against the royal army, and to hang 
some disaffected citizens at their own doors. Several of the most 



i^S THE CIVIL WAR 

distinguished peers who had hitherto remained at Westminster 
fled to the court at Oxford ; nor can it be doubted that, if the 
operations of the Cavahers had, at this season, been directed by 
a sagacious and powerful mind, Charles would have soon marched 
in triumph to Whitehall. 

But the King suffered the auspicious moment to pass away ; 
and it never returned. In August 1643 he sate down before the 
city of Gloucester. That city was defended by the inhabitants and 
by the garrison, with a determination such as had not, since the 
commencement of the war, been shown by the adherents of the 
Parliament. The emulation of London was excited. The train- 
bands of the City volunteered to march wherever their services 
might be required, A great force was speedily collected, and 
began to move westward. The siege of Gloucester was raised. 
The Royalists in every part of the kingdom were disheartened : 
the spirit of the parliamentary party revived ; and the apostate 
Lords, who had lately fled from Westminster to Oxford, hastened 
back from Oxford to Westminster. 

And now a new and alarming class of symptoms began to appear 
in the distempered body politic. There had been, from the first, 
in the parhamentary party, some men whose minds were set on 
objects from which the majority of that party would have shrunk 
with horror. These men were, in religion, Independents. They 
conceived that every Christian congregation had, under Christ, 
supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual ; that appeals to provincial 
and national synods were scarcely less unscriptural than appeals 
to the Court of Arches, or to the Vatican ; and that Popery, Prel- 
acy, and Presbyterianism were merely forms of one great apostasy. 
In politics the Independents were, to use the phrase of their time, 
root and branch men, or, to use the kindred phrase of our own 
time, radicals. Not content with limiting the power of the mon- 
arch, they were desirous to erect a commonwealth on the ruins 
of the old English poHty. At first they had been inconsiderable, 
both in numbers and in weight ; but before the war had lasted 
two years they became, not indeed the largest, but the most 
powerful faction in the country. Some of the old parliamentary 
leaders had been removed by death; and others had forfeited the 
public confidence. Pym had been borne, with princely honours, 



THOMA S BABING TON MA CA ULA Y 179 

to a grave among the Plantagenets. Hampden had fallen, as 
became him, while vainly endeavouring, by his heroic example, to 
inspire his followers with courage to face the fiery cavalry of 
Rupert. Bedford had been untrue to the cause. Northumber- 
land was known to be lukewarm. Essex and his lieutenants had 
shown little vigour and ability in the conduct of military operations. 
At such a conjuncture it was that the Independent party, ardent, 
resolute, and uncompromising, began to raise its head, both in the 
camp and in the House of Commons. 

The soul of that party was Oliver Cromwell. Bred to peaceful 
occupations, he had, at more than forty years of age, accepted a 
commission in the parliamentary army. No sooner had he become 
a soldier than he discerned, with the keen glance of genius, what 
Essex and men like Essex, with all their experience, were unable 
to perceive. He saw precisely where the strength of the Royalists 
lay, and by what means alone that strength could be overpowered. 
He saw that it was necessary to reconstruct the army of the 
Parliament. He saw also that there were abundant and excel- 
lent materials for the purpose, materials less showy, indeed, but 
more solid, than those of which the gallant squadrons of the King 
were composed. It was necessary to look for recruits who were 
not mere mercenaries, for recruits of decent station and grave 
character, fearing God and zealous for public liberty. With such 
men he filled his own regiment, and, while he subjected them to 
a discipline more rigid than had ever before been known in Eng- 
land, he administered to their intellectual and moral nature stimu- 
lants of fearful potency. 

The events of the year 1644 fully proved the superiority of his 
abilities. In the south, where Essex held the command, the 
parliamentary forces underwent a succession of shameful disasters ; 
but in the north the victory of Marston Moor fully compensated 
for all that had been lost elsewhere. The victory was not a more 
serious blow to the Royalists than to the party which had hitherto 
been dominant at Westminster ; for it was notorious that the day, 
disgracefully lost by the Presbyterians, had been retrieved by the 
energy of Cromwell, and by the steady valour of the warriors 
whom he had trained. 

These events produced the Selfdenying Ordinance and the new 



l80 THE CIVIL WAR 

model of the army. Under decorous pretexts, and with every 
mark of respect, Essex and most of those who had held high posts 
under him were removed ; and the conduct of the war was 
intrusted to very different hands. Fairfax, a brave soldier, but of 
mean understanding and irresolute temper, was the nominal Lord 
General of the forces ; but Cromwell was their real head. 

Cromwell made haste to organize the whole army on the same 
principles on which he had organized his own regiment. As soon 
as this process was complete, the event of the war was decided. 
The Cavaliers had now to encounter natural courage equal to their 
own, and discipline such as was utterly wanting to them. It soon 
became a proverb that the soldiers of Fairfax and Cromwell were 
men of a different breed from the soldiers of Essex. At Naseby 
took place the first great encounter between the Royalists and the 
remodelled army of the Houses. The victory of the Roundheads 
was complete and decisive. It was followed by other triumphs 
in rapid succession. In a few months the authority of the Parlia- 
ment was fully established over the whole kingdom. Charles 
fled to the Scots, and was by them, in a manner which did not 
much exalt their national character, delivered up to his English 
subjects. 

While the event of the war was still doubtful, the Houses had 
put the Primate to death, had interdicted, within the sphere of 
their authority, the use of the Liturgy, and had required all men 
to subscribe that renowned instrument known by the name of the 
Solemn League and Covenant. When the struggle was over, the 
work of innovation and revenge was pushed on with still greater 
ardour. The ecclesiastical polity of the kingdom was remodelled. 
Most of the old clergy were ejected from their benefices. Fines, 
often of ruinous amount, were laid on the RoyaHsts, already im- 
poverished by large aids furnished to the King. Many estates 
were confiscated. Many proscribed Cavaliers found it expedient 
to purchase, at an enormous cost, the protection of eminent mem- 
bers of the victorious party. Large domains belonging to the 
crown, to the bishops, and to the chapters were seized, and either 
granted away or put up to auction. In consequence of these 
spoliations, a great part of the soil of England was at once offered 
for sale. As money was scarce, as the market was glutted, as the 



THOMAS BASING TON MACAULAY l8l 

title was insecure, and as the awe inspired by powerful bidders 
prevented free competition, the prices were often merely nominal. 
Thus many old and honourable famiUes disappeared and were 
heard of no more ; and many new men rose rapidly to affluence. 

But, while the Houses were employing their authority thus, it 
suddenly passed out of their hands. It had been obtained by 
calling into existence a power which could not be controlled. In 
the summer of 1647, about twelve months after the last fortress of 
the Cavaliers had submitted to the Parliament, the Parliament was 
compelled to submit to its own soldiers. 

Thirteen years followed, during which England was, under 
various names and forms, really governed by the sword. Never 
before that time, or since that time, was the civil power in our 
country subjected to miHtary dictation. 

The army which now became supreme in the State was an army 
very different from any that has since been seen among us. At 
present the pay of the common soldier is not such as to seduce 
any but the humblest class of English labourers from their calling. 
A barrier almost impassable separates him from the commissioned 
officer. The great majority of those who rise high in the service 
rise by purchase. So numerous and extensive are the remote 
dependencies of England, that every man who enlists in the line 
must expect to pass many years in exile, and some years in 
climates unfavourable to the health and vigour of the European 
race. The army of the Long Parliament was raised for home 
service. The pay of the private soldier was much above the 
wages earned by the great body of the people ; and, if he distin- 
guished himself by intelligence and courage, he might hope to 
attain high commands. The ranks were accordingly composed of 
persons superior in station and education to the multitude. These 
persons, sober, moral, diligent, and accustomed to reflect, had 
been induced to take up arms, not by the pressure of want, not by 
the love of novelty and license, not by the arts of recruiting offi- 
cers, but by religious and political zeal, mingled with the desire of 
distinction and promotion. The boast of the soldiers, as we find 
it recorded in their solemn resolutions, was, that they had not 
been forced into the service, nor had enlisted chiefly for the sake 
of lucre, that they were no janissaries, but freeborn Englishmen, 



1 82 THE CIVIL WAR 

who had, of their own accord, put their lives in jeopardy for the 
Uberties and rehgion of England, and whose right and duty it was 
to watch over the welfare of the nation which they had saved. 

A force thus composed might, without injury to its efficiency, be 
indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to any other troops, 
would have proved subversive of all discipline. In general, sol- 
diers who should form themselves into political clubs, elect dele- 
gates, and pass resolutions on high questions of state, would soon 
break loose from all control, would cease to form an army, and 
would become the worst and most dangerous of mobs. Nor would 
it be safe, in our time, to tolerate in any regiment rehgious meet- 
ings, at which a corporal versed in Scripture should lead the devo- 
tions of his less gifted colonel, and admonish a backsliding major. 
But such was the intelhgence, the gravity, and the selfcommand 
of the warriors whom Cromwell had trained, that in their camp 
a political organization and a religious organization could exist 
without destroying military organization. The same men, who, 
off duty, were noted as demagogues and field preachers, were dis- 
tinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by prompt 
obedience on watch, on drill, and on the field of battle. 

In war this strange force was irresistible. The stubborn courage 
characteristic of the English people was, by the system of Crom- 
well, at once regulated and stimulated. Other leaders have main- 
tained order as strict. Other leaders have inspired their followers 
with zeal as ardent. But in his camp alone the most rigid disci- 
pline was found in company with the fiercest enthusiasm. His 
troops moved to victory with the precision of machines, while 
burning with the wildest fanaticism of Crusaders. From the time 
when the army was remodelled to the time when it was disbanded, 
it never found, either in the British islands or on the Continent, 
an enemy who could stand its onset. In England, Scotland, Ire- 
land, Flanders, the Puritan warriors, often surrounded by difficulties, 
sometimes contending against threefold odds, not only never failed 
to conquer, but never failed to destroy and break in pieces what- 
ever force was opposed to them. They at length came to regard 
the day of battle as a day of certain triumph, and marched against 
the most renowned battalions of Europe with disdainful confidence. 
Turenne was startled by the shout of stern exultation with which 



THOMAS BASING TON MACAULAY 183 

his English allies advanced to the combat, and expressed the 
delight of a true soldier, when he learned that it was ever the 
fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld 
the enemy ; and the banished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national 
pride, when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered 
by foes and abandoned by allies, drive before it in headlong rout 
the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counter- 
scarp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest 
of the Marshals of France. 

But that which chiefly distinguished the army of Cromwell from 
other armies was the austere morality and the fear of God which 
pervaded all ranks. It is acknowledged by the most zealous 
Royalists that, in that singular camp, no oath was heard, no 
drunkenness or gambling was seen, and that, during the long 
dominion of the soldiery, the property of the peaceable citizen 
and the honour of woman were held sacred. If outrages were 
committed, they were outrages of a very different kind from those 
of which a victorious army is generally guilty. No servant girl 
complained of the rough gallantry of the redcoats. Not an ounce 
of plate was taken from the shops of the goldsmiths. But a Pela- 
gian sermon, or a window on which the Virgin and Child were 
painted, produced in the Puritan ranks an excitement which it 
required the utmost exertions of the officers to quell. One of 
Cromwell's chief difficulties was to restrain his musketeers and 
dragoons from invading by main force the pulpits of ministers 
whose discourses, to use the language of that time, were not sa- 
voury ; and too many of our cathedrals still bear the marks of the 
hatred with which those stern spirits regarded every vestige of 
Popery. 

To keep down the English people was no light task even for that 
army. No sooner was the first pressure of military tyranny felt, 
than the nation, unbroken to such servitude, began to struggle 
fiercely. Insurrections broke out even in those counties which, 
during the recent war, had been the most submissive to the Parlia- 
ment. Indeed, the Parliament itself abhorred its old defenders 
more than its old enemies, and was desirous to come to terms with 
Charles at the expense of the troops. In Scotland, at the same 
time, a coalition was formed between the Royalists and a large body 



184 THE CIVIL WAR 

of Presbyterians who regarded the doctrines of the Independents 
with detestation. At length the storm burst. There were risings 
in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Wales. The fleet in the Thames 
suddenly hoisted the royal colours, stood out to sea, and menaced 
the southern coast. A great Scottish force crossed the frontier and 
advanced into Lancashire. It might well be suspected that these 
movements were contemplated with secret complacency by a 
majority both of the Lords and of the Commons. 

But the yoke of the army was not to be shaken off. While 
Fairfax suppressed the risings in the neighbourhood of the capital, 
Oliver routed the Welsh insurgents, and, leaving their castles in 
ruins, marched against the Scots. His troops were few, when com- 
pared with the invaders ; but he was Httle in the habit of count- 
ing his enemies. The Scottish army was utterly destroyed. A 
change in the Scottish government followed. An administration, 
hostile to the King, was formed at Edinburgh ; and Cromwell, 
more than ever the darling of his soldiers, returned in triumph to 
London. 

And now a design, to which, at the commencement of the civil 
war, no man would have dared to allude, and which was not less 
inconsistent with the Solemn League and Covenant than with the 
old law of England, began to take a distinct form. The austere 
warriors who ruled the nation had, during some months, meditated 
a fearful vengeance on the captive King. When and how the 
scheme originated ; whether it spread from the general to the 
ranks, or from the ranks to the general ; whether it is to be 
ascribed to policy using fanaticism as a tool, or to fanaticism bearing 
down policy with headlong impulse, are questions which, even at 
this day, cannot be answered with perfect confidence. It seems, 
however, on the whole, probable that he who seemed to lead was 
really forced to follow, and that, on this occasion, as on another 
great occasion a few years later, he sacrificed his own judgment 
and hjs own inclinations to the wishes of the army. For the 
power which he had called into existence was a power which even 
he could not always control ; and, that he might ordinarily com- 
mand, it was necessary that he should sometimes obey. He 
publicly protested that he was no mover in the matter, that the 
first steps had been taken without his privity, that he could 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAU LAY 185 

not advise the Parliament to strike the blow, but that he sub- 
mitted his own feelings to the force of circumstances which 
seemed to him to indicate the purposes of providence. It has 
been the fashion to consider those professions as instances of the 
hypocrisy which is vulgarly imputed to him. But even those who 
pronounce him a hypocrite will scarcely venture to call him a fool. 
They are therefore bound to show that he had some purpose to 
serve by secretly stimulating the army to take the course which 
he did not venture openly to recommend. It would be absurd to 
suppose that he, who was never by his respectable enemies rep- 
resented as wantonly cruel or implacably vindictive, would have 
taken the most important step of his life under the influence of 
mere malevolence. He was far too wise a man not to know, 
when he consented to shed that august blood, that he was doing a 
deed which was inexpiable, and which would move the grief and 
horror, not only of the Royalists, but of nine tenths of those who 
had stood by the Parliament. Whatever visions may have deluded 
others, he was assuredly dreaming, neither of a republic on the 
antique pattern, nor of the millennial reign of the saints. If he 
already aspired to be himself the founder of a new dynasty, it was 
plain that Charles the First was a less formidable competitor than 
Charles the Second would be. At the moment of the death of 
Charles the First, the loyalty of every Cavalier would be trans- 
ferred, unimpaired, to Charles the Second. Charles the First was 
a captive ; Charles the Second would be at liberty. Charles the 
First was an object of suspicion and dislike to a large proportion 
of those who yet shuddered at the thought of slaying him ; Charles 
the Second would excite all the interest which belongs to distressed 
youth and innocence. It is impossible to believe that considera- 
tions so obvious, and so important, escaped the most profound 
politician of that age. The truth is that Cromwell had, at one 
time, meant to mediate between the throne and Parliament, and 
to reorganize the distracted State by the power of the sword, under 
the sanction of the royal name. In this design he persisted till 
he was compelled to abandon it by the refractory temper of the 
soldiers, and by the incurable duplicity of the King. A party in 
the camp began to clamour for the head of the traitor, who was 
for treating with Agag. Conspiracies were formed. Threats of 



1 86 THE CIVIL WAR 

impeachment were loudly uttered. A mutiny broke out, which 
all the vigour and resolution of Oliver could hardly quell. And 
though, by a judicious mixture of severity and kindness, he suc- 
ceeded in restoring order, he saw that it would be in the highest 
degree difficult and perilous to contend against the rage of warriors, 
who regarded the fallen tyrant as their foe, and as the foe of their 
God. 

At the same time it became more evident than ever that the 
King could not be trusted. The vices of Charles had grown upon 
him. They were, indeed, vices which difficulties and perplexities 
generally bring out in the strongest light. Cunning is the natural 
defence of the weak. A prince, therefore, who is habitually a 
deceiver when at the height of power, is not likely to learn frank- 
ness in the midst of embarrassments and distresses. Charles was 
not only a most unscrupulous but a most unlucky dissembler. 
There never was a politician to whom so many frauds and false- 
hoods were brought home by undeniable evidence. He publicly 
recognized the Houses of Westminster as a legal Parliament, and, 
at the same time, made a private minute in council, declaring the 
recognition null. He publicly disclaimed all thought of caUing in 
foreign aid against his people : he privately solicited aid from 
France, from Denmark, and from Loraine. He publicly denied 
that he employed Papists : at the same time he privately sent to 
his generals directions to employ every Papist that would serve. 
He publicly took the sacrament at Oxford, as a pledge that he 
never would even connive at Popery : he privately assured his wife, 
that he intended to tolerate Popery in England ; and he author- 
ised Lord Glamorgan to promise that Popery should be estab- 
lished in Ireland. Then he attempted to clear himself at his 
agent's expense. Glamorgan received, in the royal handwriting, 
reprimands intended to be read by others, and eulogies which 
were to be seen only by himself. To such an extent, indeed, had 
insincerity now tainted the King's whole nature, that his most 
devoted friends could not refrain from complaining to each other, 
with bitter grief and shame, of his crooked politics. His defeats, 
they said, gave him less pain than his intrigues. Since he had 
been a prisoner, there was no section of the victorious party which 
had not been the object both of his flatteries and of his machina- 



THOMA S BAB IN G TON MA CA ULA Y 187 

tions : but never was he more unfortunate than when he attempted 
at once to cajole and to undermine Cromwell. 

Cromwell had to determine whether he would put to hazard the 
attachment of his party, the attachment of his army, his own great- 
ness, nay his own life, in an attempt, which would probably have 
been vain, to save a prince whom no engagement could bind. 
With many struggles and misgivings, and probably not without 
many prayers, the decision was made. Charles was left to his 
fate. The miUtary saints resolved that, in defiance of the old laws 
of the realm, and of the almost universal sentiment of the nation, 
the King should expiate his crimes with his blood. He for a time 
expected a death like that of his unhappy predecessors, Edward 
the Second and Richard the Second. But he was in no danger 
of such treason. Those who had him in their gripe were not mid- 
night stabbers. What they did, they did in order that it might 
be a spectacle to heaven and earth, and that it might be held in 
everlasting remembrance. They enjoyed keenly the very scandal 
which they gave. That the ancient constitution and the public 
opinion of England were directly opposed to regicide made regi- 
cide seem strangely fascinating to a party bent on effecting a com- 
plete political and social revolution. In order to accomplish their 
purpose, it was necessary that they should first break in pieces 
every part of the machinery of the government ; and this necessity 
was rather agreeable than painful to them. The Commons passed 
a vote tending to accommodation with the King. The soldiers 
excluded the majority by force. The Lords unanimously rejected 
the proposition that the King should be brought to trial. Their 
house was instantly closed. No court, known to the law, would 
take on itself the office of judging the fountain of justice. A revo- 
lutionary tribunal was created. That tribunal pronounced Charles 
a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, and a public enemy ; and his head 
was severed from his shoulders before thousands of spectators, in 
front of the banqueting hall of his own palace. 



1 88 BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT 

BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT 

FRANCIS PARKMAN 

[From chapter 4 of The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War against 
the English Colonies after the Conquest of Canada, 185 1.] 

The people of the northern English colonies had learned to 
regard their Canadian neighbors with the bitterest enmity. With 
them, the very name of Canada called up horrible recollections 
and ghastly images : the midnight massacre of Schenectady, and 
the desolation of many a New England hamlet ; blazing dwellings 
and reeking scalps ; and children snatched from their mothers' 
arms, to be immured in convents and trained up in the abomina- 
tions of Popery. To the sons of the Puritans, their enemy was 
doubly odious. They hated him as a Frenchman, and they hated 
him as a Papist. Hitherto he had waged his murderous warfare 
from a distance, wasting their settlements with rapid onsets, fierce 
and transient as a summer storm ; but now, with enterprising audac- 
ity, he was intrenching himself on their very borders. The Eng- 
lish hunter, in the lonely wilderness of Vermont, as by the warm 
glow of sunset he piled the spruce boughs for his woodland bed, 
started as a deep, low sound struck faintly on his ear, the evening 
gun of Fort Frederic, booming over lake and forest. The erection 
of this fort, better known among the English as Crown Point, was 
a piece of daring encroachment which justly kindled resentment in 
the northern colonies. But it was not here that the immediate 
occasion of a final rupture was to arise. By an article of the treaty 
of Utrecht, confirmed by that of Aix la Chapelle, Acadia had been 
ceded to England ; but scarcely was the latter treaty signed, when 
debates sprang up touching the limits of the ceded province. 
Commissioners were named on either side to adjust the disputed 
bounciary ; but the claims of the rival powers proved utterly irrec- 
oncilable, and all negotiation was fruitless. Meantime, the French 
and English forces in Acadia began to assume a beUigerent atti- 
tude, and indulge their ill blood in mutual aggression and reprisal. 
But while this game was played on the coasts of the Atlantic, 
interests of far greater moment were at stake in the west. 



FRANCIS PARKMAN 1 89 

The people of the middle colonies, placed by their local position 
beyond reach of the French, had heard with great composure of 
the sufferings of their New England brethren, and felt little con- 
cern at a danger so doubtful and remote. There were those 
among them, however, who, with greater foresight, had been quick 
to perceive the ambitious projects of the French ; and, as early 
as 1 716, Spotswood, governor of Virginia, had urged the expe- 
diency of securing the valley of the Ohio by a series of forts and 
settlements. His proposal was coldly listened to, and his plan 
fell to the ground. The time at length was come when the danger 
was approaching too near to be slighted longer. In 1748, an 
association, called the Ohio Company, was formed with the view 
of making settlements in the region beyond the Alleghanies ; and 
two years later, Gist, the company's surveyor, to the great disgust 
of the Indians, carried chain and compass down the Ohio as far 
as the falls at Louisville. But so dilatory were the English, that 
before any effectual steps were taken, their agile enemies appeared 
upon the scene. 

In the spring of 1753, the middle provinces were startled at 
the tidings that French troops had crossed Lake Erie, fortified 
themselves at the point of Presqu'-Isle, and pushed forward to 
the northern branches of the Ohio. Upon this. Governor Din- 
widdle, of Virginia, resolved to despatch a message requiring their 
removal from territories which he claimed as belonging to the 
British crown ; and looking about him for the person best quali- 
fied to act as messenger, he made choice of George Washington, 
a young man twenty-one years of age, adjutant general of the 
Virginian militia. 

Washington departed on his mission, crossed the mountains, 
descended to the bleak and leafless valley of the Ohio, and thence 
continued his journey up the banks of the Alleghany until the 
fourth of December. On that day he reached Venango, an 
Indian town on the Alleghany, at the mouth of French Creek. 
Here was the advanced post of the French ; and here, among 
the Indian log-cabins and huts of bark, he saw their flag flying 
above the house of an English trader, whom the military intruders 
had unceremoniously ejected. They gave the young envoy a 
hospitable reception, and referred hirn to the commanding officer, 



1 90 BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT 

whose headquarters were at Le Boeuf, a fort which they had 
just built on French Creek, some distance above Venango. 
Thither Washington repaired, and on his arrival was received with 
stately courtesy by the ofificer, Legardeur de St. Pierre, whom he 
describes as an elderly gentleman of very soldier-like appearance. 
To the message of Dinwiddle, St. Pierre replied that he would 
forward it to the governor general of Canada ; but that, in the 
mean time, his orders were to hold possession of the country, and 
this he should do to the best of his ability. With this answer 
Washington, through all the rigors of the midwinter forest, re- 
traced his steps, with one attendant, to the English borders. 

With the first opening of spring, a newly raised company of 
Virginian backwoodsmen, under Captain Trent, hastened across 
the mountains, and began to build a fort at the confluence of the 
Monongahela and Alleghany, where Pittsburg now stands ; when 
suddenly they found themselves invested by a host of French and 
Indians, who, with sixty bateaux and three hundred canoes, had 
descended from Le Boeuf and Venango. The English were 
ordered to evacuate the spot ; and, being quite unable to re- 
sist, they obeyed the summons, and withdrew in great discom- 
fiture towards Virginia. Meanwhile Washington, with another 
party of backwoodsmen, was advancing from the borders ; and 
hearing of Trent's disaster, he resolved to fortify himself on the 
Monongahela, and hold his ground, if possible, until fresh troops 
could arrive to support him. The French sent out a scouting 
party under M. Jumonville, with the design, probably, of watching 
his movement ; but, on a dark and stormy night, Washington sur- 
prised them, as they lay lurking in a rocky glen not far from his 
camp, killed the officer, and captured the whole detachment. 
Learning that the French, enraged by this reverse, were about to 
attack him in great force, he thought it prudent to fall back, and 
retired accordingly to a spot called the Great Meadows, where 
he had before thrown up a slight intrenchment. Here he found 
himself assailed by nine hundred French and Indians, commanded 
by a brother of the slain Jumonville. From eleven in the morn- 
ing till eight at night, the backwoodsmen, who were half famished 
from the failure of their stores, maintained a stubborn defence, 
some fighting within the intrenchment, and some on the plain 



FRANCIS PARK MAN I91 

without. In the evening, the French sounded a parley, and 
offered terms. They were accepted, and on the following day 
Washington and his men retired across the mountains, leaving 
the disputed territory in the hands of the French. 

While the rival nations were beginning to quarrel for a prize 
which belonged to neither of them, the unhappy Indians saw, with 
alarm and amazement, their lands becoming a bone of contention 
between rapacious strangers. The first appearance of the French 
on the Ohio excited the wildest fears in the tribes of that quarter, 
among whom were those who, disgusted by the encroachments of 
the Pennsylvanians, had fled to these remote retreats to escape 
the intrusions of the white men. Scarcely was their fancied 
asylum gained, when they saw themselves invaded by a host of 
armed men from Canada. Thus placed between two fires, they 
knew not which way to turn. There was no union in their coun- 
sels, and they seemed like a mob of bewildered children. Their 
native jealousy was roused to its utmost pitch. Many of them 
thought that the two white nations had conspired to destroy them, 
and then divide their lands. " You and the French," said one 
of them, a few years afterwards, to an English emissary, " are like 
the two edges of a pair of shears, and we are the cloth which is 
cut to pieces between them." 

The French labored hard to conciliate them, plying them with 
gifts and flatteries, and proclaiming themselves their champions 
against the English. At first, these arts seemed in vain, but their 
effect soon began to declare itself; and this effect was greatly 
increased by a singular piece of infatuation on the part of the 
proprietors of Pennsylvania. During the summer of 1754, dele- 
gates of the several provinces met at Albany, to concert measures 
of defence in the war which now seemed inevitable. It was at 
this meeting that the memorable plan of a union of the colonies was 
brought upon the carpet ; a plan, the fate of which was curious and 
significant, for the crown rejected it as giving too much power to 
the people, and the people as giving too much power to the crown. 
A council was also held with the Iroquois, and though they were 
found but lukewarm in their attachment to the EngHsh, a treaty 
of friendship and alliance was concluded with their deputies. It 
would have been well if the matter had ended here \ but, with ill- 



192 BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT 

timed rapacity, the proprietary agents of Pennsylvania took advan- 
tage of this great assemblage of sachems to procure from them the 
grant of extensive tracts, including the lands inhabited by the very 
tribes whom the French were at that moment striving to seduce. 
When they heard that, without their consent, their conquerors and 
tyrants, the Iroquois, had sold the soil from beneath their feet, 
their indignation was extreme ; and, convinced that there was 
no limit to English encroachment, many of them from that hour 
became fast aUies of the French. 

The courts of London and Versailles still maintained a diplo- 
matic intercourse, both protesting their earnest wish that their 
conflicting claims might be adjusted by friendly negotiation ; but 
while each disclaimed the intention of hostiUty, both were hasten- 
ing to prepare for war. Early in 1755, an English fleet sailed 
from Cork, having on board two regiments destined for Virginia, 
and commanded by General Braddock ; and soon after, a French 
fleet put to sea from the port of Brest, freighted with munitions of 
war and a strong body of troops under Baron Dieskau, an officer 
who had distinguished himself in the campaigns of Marshal Saxe. 
The English fleet gained its destination, and landed its troops in 
safety. The French were less fortunate. Two of their ships, the 
Lys and the Alcide, became involved in the fogs of the banks of 
Newfoundland ; and when the weather cleared, they found them- 
selves under the guns of a superior British force, belonging to the 
squadron of Admiral Boscawen, sent out for the express purpose 
of intercepting them. "Are we at peace or war?" demanded 
the French commander. A broadside from the EngHshman soon 
solved his doubts, and after a stout resistance the French struck 
their colors. News of the capture caused great excitement 
in England, but the conduct of the aggressors was generally 
approved ; and under pretence that the French had begun the 
war by, their alleged encroachments in America, orders were issued 
for a general attack upon their marine. So successful were the 
British cruisers, that, before the end of the year, three hundred 
French vessels, and nearly eight thousand sailors, were captured 
and brought into port. The French, unable to retort in kind, 
raised an outcry of indignation, and Mirepoix, their ambassador, 
withdrew from the court of Loridon, 



FRANCIS PAR KM AM 1 93 

Thus began that memorable war which, kindhng among the 
forests of America, scattered its fires over the kingdoms of Europe, 
and the sultry empire of the Great Mogul ; the war made glorious 
by the heroic death of Wolfe, the victories of Frederic, and the 
marvellous exploits of Clive ; the war which controlled the destinies 
of America, and was first in the chain of events which led on to her 
Revolution, with all its vast and undeveloped consequences. On 
the old battle-ground of Europe, the struggle bore the same familiar 
features of violence and horror which had marked the strife of 
former generations — fields ploughed by the cannon ball, and walls 
shattered by the exploding mine, sacked towns and blazing suburbs, 
the lamentations of women, and the license of a maddened soldiery. 
But in America, war assumed a new and striking aspect. A wilder- 
ness was its sublime arena. Army met army under the shadows 
of primeval woods ; their cannon resounded over wastes unknown 
to civilized man. And before the hostile powers could join in 
battle, endless forests must be traversed, and morasses passed, and 
every where the axe of the pioneer must hew a path for the bayonet 
of the soldier. 

Before the declaration of war, and before the breaking off of 
negotiations between the courts of France and England, the Eng- 
lish ministry formed the plan of assailing the French in America 
on all sides at once, and repelling them, by one bold push, from 
all their encroachments. A provincial army was to advance upon 
Acadia, a second was to attack Crown Point, and a third Niagara ; 
while the two regiments which had lately arrived in Virginia under 
General Braddock, aided by a strong body of provincials, were to 
dislodge the French from their newly-built fort of Du Quesne. To 
Braddock was assigned the chief command of all the British forces 
in America ; and a person worse fitted for the office could scarcely 
have been found. His experience had been ample, and none 
could doubt his courage ; but he was profligate, arrogant, perverse, 
and a bigot to military rules. On his first arrival in Virginia, he 
called together the governors of the several provinces, in order to 
explain his instructions and adjust the details of the projected 
operations. These arrangements complete, Braddock advanced 
to the borders of Virginia, and formed his camp at Fort Cumber- 
land where he spent several weeks in training the raw backwoods- 
o 



194 BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT 

men, who joined him, into such discipUne as they seemed capable 
of; in collecting horses and wagons, which could only be had with 
the utmost difficulty ; in railing at the contractors, who scanda- 
lously cheated him ; and in venting his spleen by copious abuse of 
the country and the people. All at length was ready, and early in 
June, 1755, the army left civilization behind, and struck into the 
broad wilderness as a squadron puts out to sea. 

It was no easy task to force their way over that rugged ground, 
covered with an unbroken growth of forest ; and the difficulty was 
increased by the needless load of baggage which encumbered their 
march. The crash of falling trees resounded in the front, where 
a hundred axemen labored, with ceaseless toil, to hew a passage for 
the army. The horses strained their utmost strength to drag the 
ponderous wagons over roots and stumps, through gullies and 
quagmires ; and the regular troops were daunted by the depth 
and gloom of the forest which hedged them in on either hand, 
and closed its leafy arches above their heads. So tedious was 
their progress, that, by the advice of Washington, twelve hundred 
chosen men moved on in advance with the hghter baggage and 
artillery, leaving the rest of the army to follow, by slower stages, 
with the heavy wagons. On the eighth of July the advanced body 
reached the Monongahela, at a point not far distant from Fort du 
Quesne. The rocky and impracticable ground on the eastern 
side debarred their passage, and the general resolved to cross the 
river in search of a smoother path, and recross it a few miles lower 
down, in order to gain the fort. The first passage was easily 
made, and the troops moved, in glittering array, down the western 
margin of the water, rejoicing that their goal was well-nigh reached, 
and the hour of their expected triumph close at hand. 

Scouts and Indian runners had brought the tidings of Braddock's 
approach to the French at Fort du Quesne. Their dismay was 
great, and Contrecoeur, the commander, thought only of retreat, 
when Beaujeu, a captain in the garrison, made the bold proposal 
of leading out a party of French and Indians to waylay the Eng- 
lish in the woods, and harass or interrupt their march. The offer 
was accepted, and Beaujeu hastened to, the Indian camps. 

Around the fort and beneath the adjacent forest were the bark 
lodges of savage hordes, whom the French had mustered from far 



FRANCIS PARKMAN 



195 



and near : Ojibwas and Ottawas, Hurons and Caughnawagas, 
Abenakis and Delawares. Beaujeu called the warriors together, 
flung a hatchet on the ground before them, and invited them to 
follow him out to battle ; but the boldest stood aghast at the peril, 
and none would accept the challenge. A second interview took 
place with no better success ; but the Frenchman was resolved 
to carry his point. " I am determined to go," he exclaimed. 
"What, will you suffer your father to go alone?" His daring 
proved contagious. The warriors hesitated no longer ; and when, 
on the morning of the ninth of July, a scout ran in with the news 
that the English army was but a few miles distant, the Indian 
camps were at once astir with the turmoil of preparation. Chiefs 
harangued their yelling followers, braves bedaubed themselves 
with war-paint, smeared themselves with grease, hung feathers in 
their scalp-locks, and whooped and stamped till they had wrought 
themselves into a delirium of valor. 

That morning, James Smith, an English prisoner recently cap- 
tured on the frontier of Pennsylvania, stood on the rampart, and 
saw the half-frenzied multitude thronging about the gateway, 
where kegs of bullets and gunpowder were broken open, that each 
might help himself at will. Then band after band hastened away 
towards the forest, followed and supported by nearly two hundred 
and fifty French and Canadians, commanded by Beaujeu. There 
were the Ottawas, led on, it is said, by the remarkable man whose 
name stands on the title-page of this history \ there were the 
Hurons of Lorette under their chief, whom the French called 
Athanase, and many more, all keen as hounds on the scent of 
blood. At about nine miles from the fort, they reached a spot 
where the narrow road descended to the river through deep and 
gloomy woods, and where two ravines, concealed by trees and 
bushes, seemed formed by nature for an ambuscade. Here the 
warriors ensconced themselves, and, levelling their guns over the 
edge, lay in fierce expectation, listening to the advancing drums 
of the English army. ■ 

It was past noon of a day brightened with the clear sunlight of 
an American midsummer, when the forces of Braddock began, for 
a second time, to cross the Monongahela, at the fording-place, 
which to this day bears the name of their ill-fated leader. The 



196 BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT 

scarlet columns of the British regulars, complete in martial ap- 
pointment, the rude backwoodsmen with shouldered rifles, the 
trains of artillery and the white-topped wagons, moved on in long 
procession through the shallow current, and slowly mounted the 
opposing bank. Men were there whose names have become his- 
toric : Gage, who, twenty years later, saw his routed battalions 
recoil in disorder from before the breastwork on Bunker Hill ; 
Gates, the future conqueror of Burgoyne ; and one destined to far 
loftier fame, George Washington, a boy in years, a man in calm 
thought and self-ruling wisdom. 

With steady and well-ordered march, the troops advanced into 
the great labyrinth of woods which shadowed the eastern borders 
of the river. Rank after rank vanished from sight. The forest 
swallowed them up, and the silence of the wilderness sank down 
once more on the shores and waters of the Monongahela. 

Several guides and six light horsemen led the way ; a body of 
grenadiers was close behind, and the army followed in such order 
as the rough ground would permit. Their road was tunnelled 
through the forest ; yet, deaf alike to the voice of common sense 
and to the counsel of his officers, Braddock had neglected to throw 
out scouts in advance, and pressed forward in bhnd security to 
meet his fate. Leaving behind the low grounds which bordered 
on the river, the van of the army was now ascending a gently 
sloping hill ; and here, well hidden by the thick standing columns 
of the forest, by mouldering prostrate trunks, by matted under- 
growth, by long rank grasses, lay, on either flank, the two fatal 
ravines where the Indian allies of the French were crouched in 
breathless ambuscade. No man saw the danger, when suddenly a 
discordant cry arose in front, and a murderous fire blazed in the teeth 
of the astonished grenadiers. Instinctively, as it were, the surviv- 
ors returned the volley, and returned it with good effect ; for a 
random shot struck down the brave Beaujeu, and the courage 
of the assailants was staggered by his fall. Dumas, second in com- 
mand, rallied them to the attack ; and while he, with the French 
and Canadians, made good the pass in front, the Indians opened 
a deadly fire on the right and left of the British columns. In a 
few moments, all was confusion. Th6 advance guard fell back 
on the main body, and every trace of subordination vanished. 



FRANCIS PARK MAN 1 97 

The fire soon extended along the whole length of the army, from 
front to rear. Scarce an enemy could be seen, though the forest 
resounded with their yells ; though every bush and tree was alive 
with incessant flashes ; though the lead flew like a hailstorm, 
and with every moment the men went down by scores. The 
regular troops seemed bereft of their senses. They huddled to- 
gether in the road like flocks of sheep ; and happy did he think 
himself who could wedge his way into the midst of the crowd, and 
place a barrier of human flesh between his life and the shot of the 
ambushed marksmen. Many were seen eagerly loading their mus- 
kets, and then firing them into the air, or shooting their own com- 
rades, in the insanity of their terror. The officers, for the most part, 
displayed a conspicuous gallantry ; but threats and commands were 
wasted alike on the panic-stricken multitude. It is said that at 
the onset Braddock showed signs of fear ; but he soon recovered 
his wonted intrepidity. Five horses were shot under him, and 
five times he mounted afresh. He stormed and shouted, and, 
while the Virginians were fighting to good purpose, each man be- 
hind a tree, like the Indians themselves, he ordered them with 
furious menace to form in platoons, where the fire of the enemy 
mowed them down fike grass. At length, a mortal shot silenced 
him, and two provincials bore him off the field. Washington rode 
through the tumult calm and undaunted. Two horses were killed 
under him, and four bullets pierced his clothes ; but his hour was 
not come, and he escaped without a wound. Gates was shot 
through the body, and Gage also was severely wounded. Of eighty- 
six officers, only twenty-three remained unhurt ; and of twelve 
hundred soldiers who crossed the Monongahela, more than seven 
hundred were killed and wounded. None suffered more severely 
than the Virginians, who had displayed throughout a degree of 
courage and steadiness which put the cowardice of the regulars to 
shame. The havoc among them was terrible, for of their whole 
number scarcely one-fifth left the field alive. 

The slaughter lasted three hours ; when, at length, the survivors, 
as if impelled by a general impulse, rushed tumultuously from the 
place of carnage, and with dastardly precipitation fled across the 
Monongahela. The enemy did not pursue beyond the river, 
flocking back to the field to collect the plunder^ and gather a rich 



198 THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE 

harvest of scalps. The routed troops pursued their flight until 
they met the rear division of the army, under Colonel Dunbar ; 
and even then their senseless terrors did not abate. Dunbar's 
soldiers caught the infection. Cannon, baggage, provisions and 
wagons were destroyed, and all fled together, eager to escape 
from the shadows of those awful woods, whose horrors haunted 
their imagination. They passed the defenceless settlements of the 
border, and hurried on to Philadelphia, leaving the unhappy peo- 
ple to defend themselves as they might against the tomahawk and 
scalping-knife. 

The calamities of this disgraceful overthrow did not cease with the 
loss of a few hundred soldiers on the field of battle ; for it entailed 
upon the provinces all the miseries of an Indian war. Those 
among the tribes who had thus far stood neutral, wavering between 
the French and English, now hesitated no longer. Many of them 
had been disgusted by the contemptuous behavior of Braddock. 
All had learned to despise the courage of the English, and to 
regard their own prowess with unbounded complacency. It is 
not in Indian nature to stand quiet in the midst of war; and the 
defeat of Braddock was a signal for the western savages to snatch 
their tomahawks and assail the English settlements with one accord ; 
to murder and pillage with ruthless fury, and turn the whole frontier 
of Pennsylvania and Virginia into one wide scene of woe and 
desolation. 



THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE 

THOMAS CARLYLE 
[From chapter 6, book v, of The French Revolution : a History, 1837.] 

In any case, behold, about nine in the morning, our National 
Volunteers rolling in long wide flood south-westward to the 
Hotel des Invalides : in search of the one thing needful. King's 
Procureur M. Ethys de Corny and officials are there ; the Curd 
of Saint-Etienne du Mont marches unpacific at the head of his 
militant Parish ; the Clerks of the Basoche in red coats we see 



THOMAS CARLYLE 1 99 

marching, now Volunteers of the Basoche ; the Volunteers of the 
Palais Royal : — National Volunteers, numerable by tens of thou- 
sands ; of one heart and mind. The King's muskets are the 
Nation's ; think, old M. de Sombreuil, how, in this extremity, 
thou wilt refuse them ! Old M. de Sombreuil would fain hold 
parley, send couriers; but it skills not: the walls are scaled, no 
Invalide firing a shot ; the gates must be iiung open. Patriotism 
rushes in, tumultuous, from grunsel up to ridge-tile, through all 
rooms and passages ; rummaging distractedly for arms. What 
cellar or what cranny can escape it ? The arms are found ; all 
safe there ; lying packed in straw, — apparently with a view to 
being burnt ! More ravenous than famishing lions over dead 
prey, the multitude, with clangour and vociferation, pounces on 
them ; struggling, dashing, clutching : — to the jamming-up, to the 
pressure, fracture and probable extinction of the weaker Patriot. 
And so, with such protracted crash of deafening, most discordant 
Orchestra-music, the Scene is changed ; and eight-and-twenty 
thousand sufficient firelocks are on the shoulders of as many 
National Guards, lifted thereby out of darkness into fiery 
light. 

Let Besenval look at the glitter of these muskets, as they 
flash by ! Gardes Frangaises, it is said, have cannon levelled 
on him ; ready to open, if need were, from the other side of the 
River. Motionless sits he ; " astonished," one may flatter one- 
self, " at the proud bearing (yfiere contenance) of the Parisians." — 
And now, to the Bastille, ye intrepid Parisians ! There grape- 
shot still threatens ; thither all men's thoughts and steps are 
now tending. 

Old De Launay, as we hinted, withdrew " into his interior " 
soon after midnight of Sunday. He remains there ever since, 
hampered, as all military gentlemen now are, in the saddest 
conflict of uncertainties. The H6tel-de-Ville " invites " him to 
admit National Soldiers, which is a soft name for surrender- 
ing. On the other hand, His Majesty's orders were precise. 
His garrison is but eighty-two old Invalides, reinforced by 
thirty-two young Swiss ; his walls indeed are nine feet thick, 
he has cannon and powder ; but, alas, only one day's pro- 
vision of victuals. The city too is French, the poor garrison 



200 THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE 

mostly French. Rigorous old De Launay, think what thou 
wilt do ! 

All morning, since nine, there has been a cry everywhere : To 
the Bastille! Repeated "deputations of citizens" have been 
here, passionate for arms ; whom De Launay has got dismissed 
by soft speeches through port-holes. Towards noon, Elector 
Thuriot de la Rosiere gains admittance ; finds De Launay in- 
disposed for surrender ; nay disposed for blowing up the place 
rather. Thuriot mounts with him to the battlements ; heaps of 
paving-stones, old iron and missiles lie piled ; cannon all duly 
levelled; in every embrasure a cannon, — only drawn back a 
little ! But outwards, behold, O Thuriot, how the multitude 
flows on, welling through every street : tocsin furiously pealing, 
all drums beating the generale : the Suburb Saint-Antoine rolling 
hitherward wholly, as one man ! Such vision (spectral yet real) 
thou, O Thuriot, as from thy Mount of Vision, beholdest in this 
moment: prophetic of what other Phantasmagories and loud- 
gibbering Spectral Realities, which thou yet beholdest not, but 
shalt! " Que voulez-vousV said De Launay, turning pale at 
the sight, with an air of reproach, almost of menace. " Mon- 
sieur," said Thuriot, rising into the moral-sublime, " what mean 
you ? Consider if I could not precipitate both of us from this 
height," — say only a hundred feet, exclusive of the walled 
ditch ! Whereupon De Launay fell silent. Thuriot shows him- 
self from some pinnacle, to comfort the multitude becoming sus- 
picious, fremescent : then descends ; departs with protests ; with 
warning addressed also to the Invalides, — on whom, however, it 
produces but a mixed indistinct impression. The old heads are 
none of the clearest ; besides, it is said, De Launay has been 
profuse of beverages {prodigue des boissous). They think, they 
will not fire, — if not fired on, if they can help it ; but must, on 
the whole, be ruled considerably by circumstances. 

Wo to thee, De Launay, in such an hour, if thou canst not, 
taking some one firm decision, rule circumstances ! Soft 
speeches will not serve ; hard grapeshot is questionable ; but 
hovering between the two is //^questionable. Ever wilder swells 
the tide of men ; their infinite hum waxing ever louder, into 
imprecations, perhaps into crackle of stray musketry, — which 



THOMAS CARLYLE 201 

latter, on walls nine feet thick, cannot do execution. The Outer 
Drawbridge has been lowered for Thuriot ; new deputation of citi- 
zens (it is the third, and noisiest of all) penetrates that way into 
the Outer Court : soft speeches producing no clearance of these, 
De Launay gives fire ; pulls up his Drawbridge. A slight splut- 
ter ; — which has kindled ihe too combustible chaos; made it a 
roaring fire-chaos ! Bursts forth Insurrection, at sight of its own 
blood (for there were deaths by that sputter of fire), into endless 
rolling explosion of musketry, distraction, execration ; — and 
over head, from the Fortress, let one great gun, with its grape- 
shot, go booming, to show what we could do. The Bastille is 
besieged ! 

On, then, all Frenchmen, that have hearts in your bodies ! 
Roar with all your throats, of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of 
Liberty ; stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in 
you, soul, body, or spirit; for it is the hour ! Smite thou, Louis 
Tournay, cartwright of the Marais, old-soldier of the Regiment 
Dauphin^ ; smite at that Outer Drawbridge chain, though the 
fiery hail whistles round thee ! Never, over nave or felloe, did 
thy axe strike such a stroke. Down with it, man ; down with 
it to Orcus : let the whole accursed Edifice sink thither, and 
Tyranny be swallowed up forever ! Mounted, some say, on the 
roof of the guard-room, some " on bayonets stuck into joints of 
the wall," Louis Tournay smites, brave Aubin Bonnemere (also 
an old soldier) seconding him : the chain yields, breaks ; the 
huge Drawbridge slams down, thundering {avec fracas). Glori- 
ous : and yet, alas, it is still but the outworks. The Eight grim 
Towers, with their Invalide musketry, their paving-stones and 
cannon-mouths, still soar aloft intact ; — Ditch yawning impas- 
sable, stone-faced ; the inner Drawbridge with its back towards 
us ; the Bastille is still to take ! 

To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of 
the most important in History) perhaps transcends the talent of 
mortals. Could one but, after infinite reading, get to under- 
stand so much as the plan of the building ! But there is open 
Esplanade, at the end of the Rue Saint-Antoine ; there are 
such Fore-courts, Cour Avance, Gourde VOrme, arched Gate- 
way (where Louis Tournay now fights) ; then new drawbridges, 



202 THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE 

dormant-bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight Towers : 
a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from twenty 
years to four hundred and twenty ; — beleaguered, in this its last 
hour, as we said, by mere Chaos come again ! Ordnance of all 
calibres ; throats of all capacities ; men of all plans, every man 
his own engineer : seldom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes 
was there seen so anomalous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home 
for a suit of regimentals ; no one would heed him in coloured 
clothes : half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Frangaises in the 
Place de Greve. Frantic Patriots pick up the grapeshots ; bear 
them, still hot (or seemingly so), to the H6tel-de-Ville i — Paris, 
you perceive, is to be burnt 1 Flesselles is " pale to the very 
lips ; " for the roar of the multitude grows deep. Paris v/holly 
has got to the acme of its frenzy ; whirled, all ways, by panic 
madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls simmering a 
minor whirlpool, — strengthening the barricade, since God 
knows what is coming ; and all minor whirlpools play distract- 
edly into that grand Fire-Maelstrom which is lashing round the 
Bastille. 

And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine-merchant has 
become an impromptu cannoneer. See Georget, of the Marine 
Service, fresh from Brest, ply the King of Siam's cannon. Sin- 
gular (if we were not used to the like) : Georget lay, last night, 
taking his ease at his inn ; the King of Siam's cannon also lay, 
knowing nothing of him for a hundred years. Yet now, at the 
right instant, they have got together, and discourse eloquent 
music. For, hearing what was toward, Georget sprang from the 
Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Frangaises also, will be here, 
with real artillery : were not the walls so thick ! — Upwards from 
the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighbouring roofs and 
windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry, without effect. 
The Invalides lie fiat, firing comparatively at their ease from 
behind stone ; hardly through portholes show the tip of a nose. 
We fall, shot ; and make no impression ! 

Let the conflagration rage ; of whatsoever is combustible ! 
Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted 
" Peruke-maker with two fiery torches " is for burning " the salt- 
petres of the Arsenal;" — had not a woman run screaming- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 203 

had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, 
instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on pit of 
stomach), over-turned barrels, and stayed the devouring element. 
A young beautiful lady seized escaping in these Outer Courts, 
and thought falsely to be De Launay's daughter, shall be burnt 
in De Launay's sight ; she lies swooned on a paillasse : but 
again a Patriot, it is brave Aubin Bonnemere, the old soldier, 
dashes in, and rescues her. Straw is burnt ; three cartloads of it, 
hauled thither, go up in white smoke : almost to the choking of 
Patriotism itself ; so that Elie had, with singed brows, to drag 
back one cart, and Reole the " gigantic haberdasher " another. 
Smoke as of Tophet ; confusion as of Babel ; noise as the Crack 
of Doom ! 

Blood flows ; the aliment of new madness. The wounded are 
carried into houses of the Rue Cerisaie ; the dying leave their 
last mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And 
yet, alas, how fall ? The walls are so thick ! Deputations, three 
in number, arrive from the H6tel-de-Ville ; Abb6 Fauchet (who 
was of one) can say, with what almost superhuman courage of 
benevolence. These wave their Town-flag in the arched Gate- 
way; and stand, rolling their drum; but to no purpose. In 
such Crack of Doom, De Launay cannot hear them, dare not 
believe them: they return, with justified rage, the whew of lead 
still singing in their ears. What to do ? The Firemen are 
here, squirting with their fire-pumps on the Invalides cannon, 
to wet the touch-holes ; they unfortunately cannot squirt so 
high ; but produce only clouds of spray. Individuals of classi- 
cal knowledge propose catapults. Santerre, the sonorous Brewer 
of the Suburb Saint-Antoine, advises rather that the place be 
fired by a " mixture of phosphorus and oil-of-turpentine spouted 
up through forcing-pumps : " O Spinola-Santerre, hast thou the 
mixture ready ? Every man his own engineer ! And still the 
fire-deluge abates not ; even women are firing, and Turks ; at 
least one woman (with her sweetheart), and one Turk. Gardes 
Frangaises have come ; real cannon, real cannoneers. Usher 
Maillard is busy ; half-pay Elie, half-pay Hulin rage in the midst 
of thousands. 

How the great Bastille Clock ticks (inaudible) in its Inner 



204 ^^^ STORMING OF THE BASTILLE 

Court there, at its ease, hour after hour ; as if nothing special, 
for it or the world, were passing ! It tolled One when the firing 
began ; and is now pointing towards Five, and still the firing 
slakes not. — Far down, in their vaults, the seven Prisoners 
hear muffled din as of earthquakes ; their Turnkeys answer 
vaguely. 

Wo to thee, De Launay, with thy poor hundred Invalides ! 
Broglie is distant, and his ears heavy : Besenval hears, but can 
send no help. One poor troop of Hussars has crept, reconnoi- 
tring, cautiously along the Quais, as far as Pont Neuf. " We 
are come to join you," said the Captain ; for the crowd seems 
shoreless. A large-headed dwarfish individual, of smoke-bleared 
aspect, shambles forward, opening his blue lips, for there is 
sense in him ; and croaks : " Alight then, and give up your 
arms ! " The Hussar-Captain is too happy to be escorted to the 
Barriers, and dismissed on parole. Who the squat individual 
was ? Men answer, It is M. Marat, author of the excellent 
pacific Avis au Peuple ! Great truly, O thou remarkable Dog- 
leech, is this thy day of emergence and new-birth : and yet this 
same day come four years — ! — But let the curtains of the 
Future hang. 

What shall De Launay do ? One thing only De Launay could 
have done : what he said he would do. Fancy him sitting, from 
the first, with lighted taper, within arm's-length of the Powder- 
Magazine ; motionless, like old Roman Senator, or Bronze 
Lamp-holder ; coldly apprising Thuriot, and all men, by a slight 
motion of his eye, what his resolution was : — Harmless he sat 
there, while unharmed; but the King's Fortress, meanwhile, 
could, might, would, or should in no wise be surrendered, save 
to the King's Messenger: one old man's life is worthless, so it 
be lost with honour ; but think, ye brawling canaille, how will it 
be wheti a whole Bastille springs skyward ! — In such statu- 
esque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies De Launay might have 
left Thuriot, the red Clerks of the Basoche, Cur^ of Saint- 
Stephen, and all the tagrag-and-bobtail of the world, to work 
their will. 

And yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou considered 
how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts 



THOMAS CARLYLE 205 

of all men ; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound 
of many men ? How their shriek of indignation palsies the 
strong soul ; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs ? 
The Ritter Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest 
passage, in one of his noblest Operas, was the voice of the Pop- 
ulace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser ; Bread ! 
Bread ! Great is the combined voice of men ; the utterance of 
their instincts, which are truer than their thoughts: it is the 
greatest a man encounters, among the sounds and shadows 
which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, 
has his footing somewhere beyond Time. De Launay could not 
do it. Distracted, he hovers between two ; hopes in the middle 
of despair ; surrenders not his Fortress ; declares that he will 
blow it up, seizes torches to blow it up, and does not blow it. 
Unhappy old De Launay, it is the death-agony of thy Bastille 
and thee ! Jail, Jailoring and Jailor, all three, such as they may 
have been, must finish. 

For four hours now has the World-Bedlam roared : call it the 
World-Chimaera, blowing fire ! The poor Invalides have sunk 
under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets : 
they have made a white flag of napkins ; go beating the cha?nade, 
or seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss 
at the Portcullis look weary of firing ; disheartened in the fire- 
deluge : a porthole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that 
would speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man ! On his 
plank, swinging over the abyss of that stone Ditch, plank resting 
on parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots, — he hovers peri- 
lous : such a Dove toward such an Ark ! Deftly, thou shifty 
Usher : one man already fell ; and lies smashed, far down there, 
against the masonry ! Usher Maillard falls not : deftly, unerr- 
ing, he walks, with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper 
through his porthole ; the shifty Usher snatches it, and returns. 
Terms of surrender: Pardon, immunity to all! Are they ac- 
cepted? — "■ Foi d'officier, On the word of an officer," answers 
half-pay Hulin, — or half-pay Elie, for men do not agree on it, 
— "they are ! " Sinks the drawbridge, — Usher Maillard bolt- 
ing it when down ; rushes-in the living deluge : the Bastille is 
fallen ! Victoire ! La Bastille est prise ! 



206 QUEEN ELIZABETH 

QUEEN ELIZABETH 

JOHN RICHARD GREEN 

[From A Short History of the Eitglish People, 1874.] 

NeVer had the fortunes of England sunk to a lower ebb than 
at the moment when Elizabeth mounted the throne. The coun- 
try was humiliated by defeat, and brought to the verge of rebel- 
lion by the bloodshed and misgovernment of Mary's reign. The 
old social discontent, trampled down for a time by the horsemen 
of Somerset, remained a menace to public order. The religious 
strife had passed beyond hope of reconciliation, now that the 
reformers were parted from their opponents by the fires of 
Smithfield and the party of the New Learning all but dissolved. 
The more earnest Catholics were bound helplessly to Rome. 
The temper of the Protestants, burned at home or driven into 
exile abroad, had become a fiercer thing, and the Calvinistic 
refugees were pouring back from Geneva with dreams of revolu- 
tionary change in Church and State. England, dragged at the 
heels of Philip into a useless and ruinous war, was left without 
an ally save Spain ; while France, mistress of Calais, became 
mistress of the Channel. Not only was Scotland a standing dan- 
ger in the north, through the French marriage of its queen Mary 
Stuart, and its consequent bondage to French policy ; but Mary 
Stuart and her husband now assumed the style and arms of Eng- 
lish sovereigns, and threatened to rouse every Catholic through- 
out the realm against Elizabeth's title. In presence of this host 
of dangers the country lay helpless, without army or fleet, or the 
means of manning one, for the treasury, already drained by the 
waste of Edward's reign, had been utterly exhausted by Mary's 
restoration of the Church-lands in possession of the Crown, and 
by the cost of her war with France. 

England's one hope lay in the character of her queen. Eliza- 
beth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had more 
than her mother's beauty ; her figure was commanding, her face 
long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She 
had grown up amidst the liberal culture of Henry's court a bold 



JOHN RICHARD GREEN 20/ 

horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful d ancer, a skilled musician, and 
an accomplished scholar. She studied every morning the Greek 
Testament, and followed this by the tragedies of Sophocles or 
orations of Demosthenes, and could " rub up her rusty Greek " 
at need to bandy pedantry with a Vice-Chancellor. But she was 
far from being a mere pedant. The new literature which was 
springing up around her found constant welcome in her court. 
She spoke Italian and French as fluently as her mother-tongue. 
She was familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. Even amidst the 
affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which sullied 
her later years, she listened with delight to the Faery Queen, and 
found a smile for " Master Spenser " when he appeared in her 
presence. Her moral temper recalled in its strange contrasts 
the mixed blood within her veins. She was at once the daughter 
of Henry and of Anne Boleyn. From her father she inherited 
her frank and hearty address, her love of popularity and of free 
intercourse with the people, her dauntless courage and her amaz- 
ing self-confidence. Her harsh, manlike voice, her impetuous 
will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger, came to her with 
her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they were school- 
boys ; she met the insolence of Essex with a box on the ear ; she 
would break now and then into the gravest deliberations to swear 
at her ministers like a fishwife. But strangely in contrast with 
the violent outlines of her Tudor temper stood the sensuous, self- 
indulgent nature she derived from Anne Boleyn. Splendour and 
pleasure were with Elizabeth the very air she breathed. Her 
delight was to move in perpetual progresses from castle to castle 
through a series of gorgeous pageants, fanciful and extravagant 
as a caliph's dream. She loved gaiety and laughter and wit. 
A happy retort or a finished compliment never failed to win her 
favor. She hoarded jewels. Her dresses were innumerable. 
Her vanity remained, even to old age, the vanity of a coquette 
in her teens. No adulation was too fulsome for her, no flattery 
of her beauty too gross. " To see her was heaven," Hatton 
told her, " the lack of her was hell." She would play with her 
rings that her courtiers might note the delicacy of her hands ; 
or dance a coranto that the French ambassador, hidden dexter- 
ously behind a curtain, might report her sprightliness to his 



208 QUEEN ELIZABETH 

master. Her levity, her frivolous laughter, her unwomanly 
jests, gave color to a thousand scandals. Her character, in 
fact, like her portraits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly 
reserve or self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of 
delicacy veiled the voluptuous temper which had broken out 
in the romps of her girlhood and showed itself almost ostenta- 
tiously throughout her later life. Personal beauty in a man was 
a sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome young 
squires on the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, and 
fondled her " sweet Robin," Lord Leicester, in the face of the 
court. 

It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted held 
Elizabeth almost to the last to be little more than a frivolous 
woman, or that Philip of Spain wondered how " a wanton " 
could hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Eliza- 
beth whom they saw was far from being all of Elizabeth. The 
wilfulness of Henry, the triviality of Anne Boleyn, played over 
the surface of a nature hard as steel, a temper purely intellec- 
tual, the very type of reason untouched by imagination or 
passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, Eliza- 
beth lived simply and frugally, and she worked hard. Her vanity 
and caprice had no weight whatever with her in state affairs. 
The coquette of the presence-chamber became the coolest 
and hardest of politicians at the council-board. Fresh from 
the flattery of her courtiers, she would tolerate no flattery in 
the closet ; she was herself plain and downright of speech with 
her counsellors, and she looked for a corresponding plain- 
ness of speech in return. If any trace of her sex lingered in 
her actual statesmanship, it was seen in the simplicity and 
tenacity of purpose that often underlies a woman's fluctuations 
of feeling. It was this in part which gave her her marked supe- 
riority over the statesmen of her time. No nobler group of 
ministers ever gathered round a council-board than those who 
gathered round the council-board of Elizabeth. But she was 
the instrument of none. She listened, she weighed, she used or 
put by the counsels of each in turn, but her policy as a whole 
was her own. It was a policy, not of genius, but of good sense. 
Her aims were simple and obvious : to preserve her throne, to 



JOHN RICHARD GREEN 209 

keep England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. 
Something of womanly caution and timidity perhaps backed 
the passionless indifference with which she set aside the larger 
schemes of ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. 
She was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She 
rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants to make her 
"head of the religion" and "mistress of the seas." But her 
amazing success in the end sprang mainly from this wise limita- 
tion of her aims. She had a finer sense than any of her coun- 
sellors of her real resources ; she knew instinctively how far she 
could go, and what she could do. Her cold, critical intellect 
was never swayed by enthusiasm or by panic either to exagger- 
ate or to under-estimate her risks or her power. 

Of political wisdom indeed in its larger and more generous 
sense Elizabeth had little or none ; but her political tact was 
unerring. She seldom saw her course at a glance, but she 
played with a hundred courses, fitfully and discursively, as a 
musician runs his fingers over the key-board, till she hit sud- 
denly upon the right one. Her nature was essentially practical 
and of the present. She distrusted a plan in fact just in pro- 
portion to its speculative range or its outlook into the future. 
Her notion of statesmanship lay in watching how things turned 
out around her, and in seizing the moment for making the best 
of them. A policy of this limited, practical, tentative order was 
not only best suited to the England of her day, to its small 
resources and the transitional character of its religious and 
political belief, but it was one eminently suited to Elizabeth's 
peculiar powers. It was a policy of detail, and in details her 
wonderful readiness and ingenuity found scope for their exer- 
cise. " No War, my Lords," the Queen used to cry imperiously 
at the council-board, " No War ! " but her hatred of war sprang 
less from her aversion to blood or to expense, real as was her 
aversion to both, than from the fact that peace left the field 
open to the diplomatic manoeuvres and intrigues in which she 
excelled. Her delight in the consciousness of her ingenuity 
broke out in a thousand puckish freaks, — freaks in which one 
can hardly see any purpose beyond the purpose of sheer mysti- 
fication. She revelled in " bye-ways " and " crooked ways." 
p 



210 QUEEN ELIZABETH 

She played with grave cabinets as a cat plays with a mouse, 
and with much of the same feline delight in the mere embarrass- 
ment of her victims. When she was weary of mystifying foreign 
statesmen she turned to find fresh sport in mystifying her own 
ministers. Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign she 
would have prided herself, not on the triumph of England or 
the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hood- 
winked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty 
years. Nor was her trickery without political value. Ignoble, 
inexpressibly wearisome as the Queen's diplomacy seems to us 
now, tracing it as we do through a thousand despatches, it suc- 
ceeded in its main end. It gained time, and every year that 
was gained doubled Elizabeth's strength. Nothing is more 
revolting in the Queen, but nothing is more characteristic, than 
her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but 
in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood 
without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was to her simply 
an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty ; and the ease with 
which she asserted or denied whatever suited her purpose was 
only equalled by the cynical indifference with which she met 
the exposure of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. 
The same purely intellectual view of things showed itself in the 
dexterous use she made of her very faults. Her levity carried 
her gaily over moments of detection and embarrassment where 
better women would have died of shame. She screened her 
tentative and hesitating statesmanship under the natural timid- 
ity and vacillation of her sex. She turned her very luxury and 
sports to good account. There were moments of grave danger 
in her reign when the country remained indifferent to its perils, 
as it saw the Queen give her days to hawking and hunting, and 
her nigjits to dancing and plays. Her vanity and affectation, 
her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the 
diplomatic comedies she played with the successive candidates 
for her hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, 
she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and con- 
spiracies by love sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining 
a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a flirtation. 
As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying 



JOHN RICHARD GREEN 2 1 1 

and intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense 
of contempt. But wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, 
the aims of her policy were throughout temperate and simple, 
and they were pursued with a singular tenacity. The sudden 
acts of energy which from time to time broke her habitual hesi- 
tation proved that it was no hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth 
could wait and finesse ; but when the hour was come she could 
strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to 
a rash self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. She had, as 
strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence in her 
luck. " Her Majesty counts much on Fortune," Walsingham 
wrote bitterly; " I wish she would trust more in Almighty God." 
The diplomatists who censured at one moment her irresolution, 
her delay, her changes of front, censure at the next her " obsti- 
nacy," her iron will, her defiance of what seemed to them inevi- 
table ruin. " This woman," Philip's envoy wrote after a wasted 
remonstrance, " this woman is possessed by a hundred thousand 
devils." To her own subjects, indeed, who knew nothing of her 
manoeuvres and retreats, of her "bye-ways" and "crooked 
ways," she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. 
Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish Main or 
glided between the icebergs of Baffin's Bay never doubted that 
the palm of bravery lay with their Queen. Her steadiness and 
courage in the pursuit of her aims was equalled by the wisdom 
with which she chose the men to accomplish them. She had a 
quick eye for merit of any sort, and a wonderful power of enlist- 
ing its whole energy in her service. The sagacity which chose 
Cecil and Walsingham was just as unerring in its choice of the 
meanest of her agents. Her success indeed in securing from 
the beginning of her reign to its end, with the single exception 
of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set them 
to do, sprang in great measure from the noblest characteristic 
of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim her temper fell below 
many of the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in 
the universality of its sympathy it stood far above them all. 
Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy with 
Bruno ; she could discuss Euphuism with Lyly, and enjoy the 
chivalry of Essex ; she could turn from talk of the last fashions 



212 QUEEN ELIZABETH 

to pore with Cecil over despatches and treasury books; she could 
pass from tracking traitors with Walsingham to settle points of 
doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the chances 
of a north-west passage to the Indies. The versatility and 
many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand every 
phase of the intellectual movement of her day, and to fix by a 
sort of instinct on its higher representatives. But the greatness 
of the Queen rests above all on her power over her people. 
We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so popular as 
Elizabeth. The passion of love, of loyalty, of admiration which 
finds its most perfect expression in the Faery Queen, throbbed 
as intensely through the veins of her meanest subjects. To 
England, during her reign of half a century, she was a virgin 
and a Protestant Queen ; and her immorality, her absolute want 
of religious enthusiasm, failed utterly to blur the brightness of 
the national ideal. Her worst acts broke fruitlessly against the 
general devotion. A Puritan, whose hand she cut off in a freak 
of tyrannous resentment, waved his hat with the hand that was 
left, and shouted, " God save Queen Elizabeth ! " Of her faults, 
indeed, England beyond the circle of her court knew little or 
nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy were never seen out- 
side the royal closet. The nation at large could only judge her 
foreign policy by its main outlines, by its temperance and good 
sense, and above all by its success. But every Englishman was 
able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at home, in her love of peace, 
her instinct of order, the firmness and moderation of her gov- 
ernment, the judicious spirit of conciliation and compromise 
among warring factions which gave the country an unexampled 
tranquillity at a time when almost every other country in Europe 
was torn with civil war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, 
the sight of London as it became the mart of the world, of 
stately mansions as they rose on every manor, told, and justly 
told, in Elizabeth's favour. In one act of her civil administration 
she showed the boldness and originality of a great ruler ; for 
the opening of her reign saw her face the social difficulty which 
had so long impeded English progress, by the issue of a commis- 
sion of inquiry which ended in the solution of the problem by 
the system of poor-laws. She lent a ready patronage to the 



JOHN RICHARD GREEN 213 

new commerce ; she considered its extension and protection as 
a part of public policy, and her statue in the centre of the Lon- 
don Exchange was a tribute on the part of the merchant class to 
the interest with which she watched and shared personally in its 
enterprises. Her thrift won a general gratitude. The memo- 
ries of the Terror and of the Martyrs threw into bright relief 
the aversion from bloodshed which was conspicuous in her ear- 
lier reign, and never wholly wanting through its fiercer close. 
Above all there was a general confidence in her instinctive 
knowledge of the national temper. Her finger was always on 
the public pulse. She knew exactly when she could resist the 
feeling of her people, and when she must give way before 
the new sentiment of freedom which her policy unconsciously 
fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace 
of victory ; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender 
won back at once the love that her resistance had lost. Her 
attitude at home in fact was that of a woman whose pride in the 
well-being of her subjects, and whose longing for their favour, 
was the one warm touch in the coldness of her natural temper. 
If Elizabeth could be said to love anything, she loved England. 
" Nothing," she said to her first Parliament, in words of unwonted 
fire, " nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me 
as the love and good-will of my subjects." And the love and 
good-will which were so dear to her she fully won. 

She clung perhaps to her popularity the more passionately 
that it hid in some measure from her the terrible loneliness of 
her life. She was the last of the Tudors, the last of Henry's 
children ; and her nearest relatives were Mary Stuart and 
the House of Suffolk, one the avowed, the other the secret 
claimant of her throne. Among her mother's kindred she found 
but a single cousin. Whatever M^omanly tenderness she had, 
wrapt itself around Leicester ; but a marriage with Leicester 
was impossible, and every other union, could she even have 
bent to one, was denied to her by the political difficulties of her 
position. The one cry of bitterness which burst from Elizabeth 
revealed her terrible sense of the solitude of her life. " The 
Queen of Scots," she cried at the birth of James, " has a fair 
son, and I am but a barren stock." But the loneliness of her 



214 QUEEN ELIZABETH 

position only reflected the loneliness of her nature. She stood 
utterly apart from the world around her, sometimes above it, 
sometimes below it, but never of it. It was only on its intellec- 
tual side that Elizabeth touched the England of her day. All 
its moral aspects were simply dead to her. It was a time when 
men were being lifted into nobleness by the new moral energy 
which seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole people, 
when honour and enthusiasm took colours of poetic beauty, and 
religion became a chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the 
men around her touched Elizabeth simply as the fair tints of a 
picture would have touched her. She made her market with 
equal indifference out of the heroism of William of Orange or 
the bigotry of Philip. The noblest aims and lives were only 
counters on her board. She was the one soul in her realm 
whom the news of St. Bartholomew stirred to no thirst for ven- 
geance ; and while England was thrilling with its triumph over 
the Armada, its Queen was coolly grumbling over the cost, and 
making her profit out of the spoiled provisions she had ordered 
for the fleet that saved her. To the voice of gratitude, indeed, 
she was for the most part deaf. She accepted services such as 
were never rendered to any other English sovereign without a 
thought of return. Walsingham spent his fortune in saving her 
life and her throne, and she left him to die a beggar. But, as 
if by a strange irony, it was to this very want of sympathy that 
she owed some of the grander features of her character. If she 
was without love, she was without hate. She cherished no 
petty resentments ; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of 
the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her 
good humor was never ruffled by the charges of wantonness and 
cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every court in Europe. She 
was insensible to fear. Her life became at last the mark for 
assassm after assassin, but the thought of peril was the one 
hardest to bring home to her. Even when the Catholic plots 
broke out in her very household she would listen to no proposals 
for the removal of Catholics from her court. 



JAMES BRYCE 215 

NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS AS 
MOULDING PUBLIC OPINION 

JAMES BRYCE 
[Chapter 80 of The American Commonwealth, 1894.] 

As the public opinion of a' people is even more directly than 
its pohtical institutions the reflection and expression of its charac- 
ter, we may begin the analysis of opinion in America by noting 
some of those general features of national character which give 
tone and colour to the people's thoughts and feelings on politics. 
There are, of course, varieties proper to different classes, and to 
different parts of the vast territory of the Union ; but it is well to 
consider first such characteristics as belong to the nation as a 
whole, and afterwards to examine the various classes and districts 
of the country. And when I speak of the nation, I mean the 
native Americans. What follows is not applicable to the recent 
immigrants from Europe, and, of course, even less applicable to 
the Southern negroes ; though both these elements are potent by 
their votes. 

The Americans are a good-natured people, kindly, helpful to 
one another, disposed to take a charitable view even of wrong- 
doers. Their anger sometimes flames up, but the fire is soon 
extinct. Nowhere is cruelty more abhorred. Even a mob 
lynching a horse thief in the West has consideration for the 
criminal, and will give him a good drink of whisky before he is 
strung up. Cruelty to slaves was unusual w):iile slavery lasted, 
the best proof of which is the quietness of the slaves during the 
war when all the men and many of the boys of the South were 
serving in the Confederate armies. As everybody knows, juries 
are more lenient to offences of all kinds but one, offences against 
women, than they are anywhere in Europe. The Southern 
" rebels " were soon forgiven ; and though civil wars are pro- 
verbially bitter, there have been few struggles in which the 
combatants did so many little friendly acts for one another, 
\few in which even the vanquished have so quickly buried their 



2l6 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 

resentments. It is true that newspapers and public speakers 
say hard things of their opponents ; but this is a part of the 
game, and is besides a way of relieving their feelings : the bark 
is sometimes the louder in order that a bite may not follow. 
Vindictiveness shown by a public man excites general dis- 
approval, and the maxim of letting bygones be bygones is 
pushed so far that an offender's misdeeds are often forgotten 
when they ought to be remembered against him. 

All the world knows that they are a humorous people. They 
are as conspicuously the purveyors of humour to the nineteenth 
century as the French were the purveyors of wit to the eighteenth. 
Nor is this sense of the ludicrous side of things confined to a few 
brilliant writers. It is diffused among the whole people ; it 
colours their ordinary life, and gives to their talk that distinctively 
new flavour which a European palate enjoys. Their capacity for 
enjoying a joke against themselves was oddly illustrated at the 
outset of the Civil War, a time of stern excitement, by the merri- 
ment which arose over the hasty retreat of the Federal troops at 
the battle of Bull Run. When William M. Tweed was ruling and 
robbing New York, and had set on the bench men who were 
openly prostituting justice, the citizens found the situation so 
amusing that they almost forgot to be angry. Much of President 
Lincoln's popularity, and much also of the gift he showed for 
restoring confidence to the North at the darkest moments of the 
war, was due to the humorous way he used to turn things, convey- 
ing the impression of not being himself uneasy, even when he was 
most so. 

That indulgent view of mankind which I have already mentioned, 
a view odd in a people whose ancestors were penetrated with the 
belief in original sin, is strengthened by this wish to get amuse- 
ment 9ut of everything. The want of seriousness which it pro- 
duces may be more apparent than real. Yet it has its signifi- 
cance ; for people become affected by the language they use, as 
we see men grow into cynics when they have acquired the habit 
of talking cynicism for the sake of effect. 

They are a hopeful people. Whether or no they are right in 
calling themselves a new people, they certainly seem to feel in 
their veins the bounding pulse of youth. They see a long vista 



JAMES BRYCE 21/ 

of years stretching out before them, in which they will have time 
enough to cure all their faults, to overcome all the obstacles that 
block their path. They look at their enormous territory with its 
still only half-explored sources of wealth, they reckon up the 
growth of their population and their products, they contrast the 
comfort and intelligence of their labouring classes with the con- 
dition of the masses in the Old World. They remember the 
dangers that so long threatened the Union from the slave power, 
and the rebellion it raised, and see peace and harmony now 
restored, the South more prosperous and contented than at any 
previous epoch, perfect good feeling between all sections of the 
country. It is natural for them to believe in their star. And this 
sanguine temper makes them tolerant of evils which they regard 
as transitory, removable as soon as time can be found to root 
them up. 

They have unbounded faith in what they call the People and 
in a democratic system of government. The great States of the 
European continent are distracted by the contests of Republicans 
and Monarchists, and of rich and poor, — contests which go down 
to the foundations of government, and in France are further em- 
bittered by religious passions. Even in England the ancient 
Constitution is always under repair, and while many think it is 
being ruined by changes, others hold that still greater changes are 
needed to make it tolerable. No such questions trouble native 
American minds, for nearly everybody believes, and everybody 
declares, that the frame of government is in its main lines so 
excellent that such reforms as seem called for need not touch those 
lines, but are required only to protect the Constitution from being 
perverted by the parties. Hence a further confidence that the 
people are sure to decide right in the long run, a confidence 
inevitable and essential in a government which refers every ques- 
tion to the arbitrament of numbers. There have, of course, been 
instances where the once insignificant minority proved to have 
been wiser than the majority of the moment. Such was eminently 
the case in the great slavery struggle. But here the minority pre- 
vailed by growing into a majority as events developed the real 
issues, so that this also has been deemed a ground for holding 
that all minorities which have right on their side will bring round 



2l8 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 

their antagonists, and in the long run win by voting power. If 
you ask an intelligent citizen why he so holds, he will answer that 
truth and justice are sure to make their way into the minds and 
consciences of the majority. This is deemed an axiom, and the 
more readily so deemed, because truth is identified with common 
sense, the quality which the average citizen is most confidently 
proud of possessing. 

This feeling shades off into another, externally like it, but at 
bottom distinct — the feeling not only that the majority, be it 
right or wrong, will and must prevail, but that its being the major- 
ity proves it to be right. This idea, which appears in the guise 
sometimes of piety and sometimes of fatalism, seems to be no 
contemptible factor in the present character of the people. It 
will be more fully dealt with in a later chapter. 

The Americans are an educated people, compared with the 
whole mass of the population in any European country except 
Switzerland, parts of Germany, Norway, Iceland, and Scotland ; 
that is to say, the average of knowledge is higher, the habit of 
reading and thinking more generally diffused, than in any other 
country. (I speak, of course, of the native Americans, excluding 
negroes and recent immigrants.) They know the Constitution of 
their own country, they follow public affairs, they join in local gov- 
ernment and learn from it how government must be carried on, 
and in particular how discussion must be conducted in meetings, 
and its results tested at elections. The Town Meeting has been 
the most perfect school of self-government in any modern country. 
In villages, they still exercise their minds on theological questions, 
debating points of Christian doctrine with no small acuteness. 
Women in particular, though their chief reading is fiction and 
theology, pick up at the pubHc schools and from the popular 
magazines far more miscellaneous information than the women 
of any European country possess, and this naturally tells on the 
intelligence of the men. 

That the education of the masses is nevertheless a superficial 
education goes without saying. It is sufficient to enable them to 
think they know something about the great problems of politics : 
insufficient to show them how little they know. The public ele- 
mentary school gives everybody the key to knowledge in making 



JAMES BRYCE 219 

reading and writing familiar, but it has not time to teach him how 
to use the key, whose use is in fact, by the pressure of daily work, 
almost confined to the newspaper and the magazine. So we may 
say that if the political education of the average American voter 
be compared with that of the average voter in Europe, it stands 
high ; but if it be compared with the functions which the theory 
of the American government lays on him, which its spirit implies, 
which the methods of its party organization assume, its inadequacy 
is manifest. This observation, however, is not so much a reproach 
to the schools, which generally do what English schools omit — 
instruct the child in the principles of the Constitution — as a 
tribute to the height of the ideal which the American conception 
of popular rule sets up. 

For the functions of the citizen are not, as has hitherto been the 
case in Europe, confined to the choosing of legislators, who are 
then left to settle issues of policy and select executive rulers. 
The American citizen is one of the governors of the Republic. 
Issues are decided and rulers selected by the direct popular vote. 
Elections are so frequent that to do his duty at them a citizen 
ought to be constantly watching public affairs with a full compre- 
hension of the principles involved in them, and a judgment of the 
candidates derived from a criticism of their arguments as well as a 
recollection of their past careers. The instruction received in the 
common schools and from the newspapers, and supposed to be 
developed by the practice of primaries and conventions, while it 
makes the voter deem himself capable of governing, does not fit 
him to weigh the real merits of statesmen, to discern the true 
grounds on which questions ought to be decided, to note the 
drift of events and discover the direction in which parties are 
being carried. He is like a sailor who knovys the spars and ropes 
of the ship and is expert in working her, but is ignorant of geogra- 
phy and navigation ; who can perceive that some of the officers 
are smart and others dull, but cannot judge which of them is 
qualified to use the sextant or will best keep his head during a 
hurricane. 

They are a moral and well-conducted people. Setting aside 
the colluvies ge^itiiim ^ which one finds in Western mining camps, 

1 [Offscourings of nations.] 



220 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 

and which popular Uterature has presented to Europeans as far 
larger than it really is, setting aside also the rabble of a few great 
cities and the negroes of the South, the average of temperance, 
chastity, truthfulness, and general probity is somewhat higher than 
in any of the great nations of Europe. The instincts of the native 
farmer or artisan are almost invariably kindly and charitable. He 
respects the law; he is deferential to women and indulgent to 
children ; he attaches an almost excessive value to the possession 
of a genial manner and the observance of domestic duties. 

They are also a religious people. It is not merely that they 
respect religion and its ministers, for that one might say of Russians 
or Sicilians, not merely that they are assiduous church-goers and 
Sunday-school teachers, but that they have an intelligent interest 
in the form of faith they profess, are pious without superstition, 
and zealous without bigotry. The importance which they still, 
though less than formerly, attach to dogmatic propositions, does 
not prevent them from feeling the moral side of their theology. 
Christianity influences conduct, not indeed half as much as in 
theory it ought, but probably more than it does in any other 
modern country, and far more than it did in the so-called ages of 
faith. 

Nor do their moral and religious impulses remain in the soft 
haze of self-complacent sentiment. The desire to expunge or 
cure the visible evils of the world is strong. Nowhere are so 
many philanthropic and reformatory agencies at work. Zeal out- 
runs discretion, outruns the possibilities of the case, in not a few 
of the efforts made, as well by legislation as by voluntary action, to 
suppress vice, to prevent intemperance, to purify popular literature. 

Religion apart, they are an unreverential people. I do not 
mean irreverent, — far from it ; nor do I mean that they have not 
a great .capacity for hero-worship, as they have many a time shown. 
I mean that they are little disposed, especially in public ques- 
tions — political, economical, or social — to defer to the opinions 
of those who are wiser or better instructed than themselves. 
Everything tends to make the individual independent and self- 
rehant. He goes early into the world ; he is left to make his way 
alone ; he tries one occupation after another, if the first or second 
venture does not prosper ; he gets to think that each man is his 



JAMES BRYCE 221 

own best helper and adviser. Thus he is led, I will not say to 
form his own opinions, for even in America few are those who do 
that, but to fancy that he has formed them, and to feel little need 
of aid from others towards correcting them. There is, therefore, 
less disposition than in Europe to expect light and leading on 
public affairs from speakers or writers. Oratory is not directed 
towards instruction, but towards stimulation. Special knowledge, 
which commands deference in applied science or in finance, does 
not command it in politics, because that is not deemed a special 
subject, but one within the comprehension of every practical man. 
Politics is, to be sure, a profession, and so far might seem to need 
professional aptitudes. But the professional politician is not the 
man who has studied statesmanship, but the man who has prac- 
tised the art of running conventions and winning elections. 

Even that strong point of America, the completeness and highly 
popular character of local government, contributes to lower the 
standard of attainment expected in a public man, because the 
citizens judge of all politics by the politics they see first and 
know best, — those of their township or city, — and fancy that 
he who is fit to be selectman, or county commissioner, or alder- 
man, is fit to sit in the great council of the nation. Like the 
shepherd in Virgil, they think the only difference between their 
town and Rome is in its size, and believe that what does for La- 
fayetteville will do well enough for Washington. Hence when 
a man of statesmanlike gifts appears, he has little encouragement 
to take a high and statesmanlike tone, for his words do not neces- 
sarily receive weight from his position. He fears to be instruc- 
tive or hortatory, lest such an attitude should expose him to 
ridicule ; and in America ridicule is a terrible power. Nothing 
escapes it. Few have the courage to face it. In the indulgence 
of it even this humane race can be unfeehng. 

They are a busy people. I have already observed that the 
leisured class is relatively small, is in fact confined to a few East- 
ern cities. The citizen has little time to think about political 
problems. Engrossing all the working hours, his avocation leaves 
him only stray moments for this fundamental duty. It is true 
that he admits his responsibilities, considers himself a member 
of a party, takes some interest in current events. But although 



222 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 

he would reject the idea that his thinking should be done for 
him, he has not leisure to do it for himself, and must practically 
lean upon and follow his party. It astonishes an English visitor 
to find how small a part politics play in conversation among the 
wealthier classes and generally in the cities. During a tour of 
four months in America in the autumn of 1881, in which I had 
occasion to mingle with all sorts and conditions of men in all 
parts of the country, and particularly in the Eastern cities, I never 
once heard American politics discussed except when I or some 
other European brought the subject on the carpet. In a presi- 
dential year, and especially during the months of a presidential 
campaign, there is, of course, abundance of private talk, as well 
as of public speaking, but even then the issues raised are largely 
personal rather than political in the European sense. But at 
other times the visitor is apt to feel — more, I think, than he feels 
anywhere in Britain — that his host has been heavily pressed by 
his own business concerns during the day, and that when the 
hour of relaxation arrives he gladly turns to hghter and more 
agreeable topics than the state of the nation. This remark is less 
applicable to the dwellers in villages. There is plenty of political 
chat round the store at the cross roads, and though it is rather 
in the nature of gossip than of debate, it seems, along with the 
practice of local government, to sustain the interest of ordinary 
folk in public affairs.^ 

. The want of serious and sustained thinking is not confined to 
pohtics. One feels it even more as regards economical and social 
questions. To it must be ascribed the vitality of certain preju- 
dices and fallacies which could scarcely survive the continuous 
application of such vigorous minds as one finds among the Ameri- 
cans. Their quick perceptions serve them so well in business 
and in the ordinary affairs of private life that they do not feel the 
need for minute investigation and patient reflection on the under- 
lying principles of things. They are apt to ignore difficulties, and 

1 The European country where the common pe.ople best understand politics is 
Switzerland. That where they talk most about politics is, I think, Greece. I re- 
member, for instance, in crossing the channel which divides Cephalonia from 
Ithaca, to have heard the boatmen discuss a recent ministerial crisis at Athens, 
during the whole voyage, with the liveliest interest and apparently some knowledge. 



JAMES BRYCE 223 

when they can no longer ignore them, they will evade them rather 
than lay siege to them according to the rules of art. The sense 
that there is no time to spare haunts an American even when he 
might find the time, and would do best for himself by finding it. 

Some one will say that an aversion to steady thinking belongs 
to the average man everywhere. Admitting this, I must repeat 
once more that we are now comparing the Americans not with 
average men in other countries, but with the ideal citizens of a 
democracy. We are trying them by the standard which the 
theory of their government assumes. In other countries states- 
men or philosophers do, and are expected to do, the sohd think- 
ing for the bulk of the people. Here the people are expected to 
do it for themselves. To say that they do it imperfectly is not 
to deny them the credit of doing it better than a European phi- 
losopher might have predicted. 

They are a commercial people, whose point of view is primarily 
that of persons accustomed to reckon profit and loss. Their 
impulse is to apply a direct practical test to men and measures, 
to assume that the men who have got on fastest are the smartest 
men, and that a scheme which seems to pay well deserves to be 
supported. Abstract reasonings they dislike, subtle reasonings 
they suspect ; they accept nothing as practical which is not plain, 
downright, apprehensible by an ordinary understanding. Although 
open-minded, so far as willingness to listen goes, they are hard to 
convince, because they have really made up their minds on most 
subjects, having adopted the prevailing notions of their locality or 
party as truths due to their own reflection. 

It may seem a contradiction to remark that with this shrewd- 
ness and the sort of hardness it produces, they are nevertheless an 
impressionable people. Yet this is true. It is not their intellect, 
however, that is impressionable, but their imagination and emo- 
tions, which respond in unexpected ways to appeals made on behalf 
of a cause which seems to have about it something noble or pathetic. 
They are capable of an ideaUty surpassing that of Englishmen or 
Frenchmen. 

They are an unsettled people. In no State of the Union is the 
bulk of the population so fixed in its residence as everywhere in 
Europe ; in many it is almost nomadic. Except in some of the 



224 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 

stagnant districts of the South, nobody feels rooted to the soil. 
Here to-day and gone to-morrow, he cannot readily contract 
habits or trustful dependence on his neighbours. Community of 
interest, or of belief in such a cause as temperance, or protection 
for native industry, unites him for a time with others similarly 
minded, but congenial spirits seldom live long enough together 
to form a school or type of local opinion which develops strength 
and becomes a proselytizing force. Perhaps this tends to prevent 
the growth of variety in opinion. When a man arises with some 
power of original thought in politics, he is feeble if isolated, and 
is depressed by his insignificance, whereas if he grows up in 
favourable soil with sympathetic minds around him, whom he can 
in prolonged intercourse permeate with his ideas, he learns to 
speak with confidence and soars on the wings of his disciples. 
One who considers the variety of conditions under which men live 
in America may certainly find ground for surprise that there should 
be so few independent schools of opinion. 

But even while an unsettled, they are nevertheless an associative, 
because a sympathetic people. Although the atoms are in con- 
stant motion, they have a strong attraction for one another. Each 
man catches his neighbour's sentiment more quickly and easily 
than happens with the English. That sort of reserve and isolation, 
that tendency rather to repel than to invite confidence, which for- 
eigners attribute to the Enghshman, though it belongs rather to 
the upper and middle class than to the nation generally, is, though 
not absent, yet less marked in America.^ It seems to be one of 
the notes of difference between the two branches of the race. In 
the United States, since each man Hkes to feel that his ideas raise 
in other minds the same emotions as in his own, a sentiment or 
impulse is rapidly propagated and quickly conscious of its strength. 
Add to this the aptitude for organization which their history and 
institutions have educed, and one sees how the tendency to form 
and the talent to work combinations for a political or any other 

1 I do not mean that Americans are more apt to unbosom themselves to 
strangers, but that they have rather more adaptiveness than the Enghsh, and are 
less disposed to stand alone and care nothing for the opinion of others. It is worth 
noticing that Americans travelling abroad seem to get more easily into touch with 
the inhabitants of the country than the English do ; nor have they the English habit 
of calling those inhabitants — Frenchmen, for instance, or Germans — " the natives. " 



JAMES BRYCE 22 5 

object has become one of the great features of the country. 
Hence, too, the immense strength of party. It rests not only on 
interest and habit and the sense of its value as a means of work- 
ing the government, but also on the sympathetic element and 
instinct of combination ingrained in the national character. 

They are a changeful people. Not fickle, for they are if any- 
thing too tenacious of ideas once adopted, too fast bound by 
party ties, too willing to pardon the errors of a cherished leader. 
But they have what chemists call low specific heat; they grow 
warm suddenly and cool as suddenly ; they are liable to swift 
and vehement outbursts of feeling which rush like wildfire across 
the country, gaining glow, like the wheel of a railway car, by the 
accelerated motion. The very similarity of ideas and equality of 
conditions which makes them hard to convince at first makes a 
conviction once implanted run its course the more triumphantly. 
They seem all to take flame at once, because what has told upon 
one, has told in the same way upon all the rest, and the obstruct- 
ing and separating barriers which exist in Europe scarcely exist 
here. Nowhere is the saying so applicable that nothing succeeds 
like success. The native American or so-called Know-nothing 
party had in two years from its foundation become a tremendous 
force, running, and seeming for a time likely to carry, its own 
presidential candidate. In three years more it was dead without 
hope of revival. Now and then, as for instance in the elections 
of 1874-75, and again in those of 1890, there comes a rush of 
feeling so sudden and tremendous, that the name of Tidal Wave 
has been invented to describe it. 

After this it may seem a paradox to add that the Americans 
are a conservative people. Yet any one who observes the power 
of habit among them, the tenacity with which old institutions 
and usages, legal and theological formulas, have been clung to, 
will admit the fact. A love for what is old and established is in 
their English blood. Moreover, prosperity helps to make them 
conservative. They are satisfied with the world they live in, for 
they have found it a good world, in which they have grown rich 
and can sit under their own vine and fig tree, none making them 
afraid. They are proud of their history and of their Constitu- 
tion, which has come out of the furnace of civil war with 
Q 



226 THE ORIGIN OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 

scarcely the smeil of fire upon it. It is little to say that they 
do not seek change for the sake of change, because the nations 
that do this exist only in the fancy of alarmist philosophers. 
There are nations, however, whose impatience of existing evils, 
or whose proneness to be allured by visions of a brighter future, 
makes them under-estimate the risk of change, nations that will 
pull up the plant to see whether it has begun to strike root. This 
is not the way of the Americans. They are no doubt ready to 
listen to suggestions from any quarter. They do not consider 
that an institution is justified by its existence, but admit everything 
to be matter for criticism. Their keenly competitive spirit and 
pride in their own ingenuity have made them quicker than any 
other people to adopt and adapt inventions: telephones were in 
use in every little town over the West, while in the city of Lon- 
don men were just beginning to wonder whether they could be 
made to pay. I have remarked in an earlier chapter that the 
fondness for trying experiments has produced a good deal of 
hasty legislation, especially in the newer States, and that some of it 
has already been abandoned. But these admissions do not affect 
the main proposition. The Americans are at bottom a conserva- 
tive people, in virtue both of the deep instincts of their race and 
of that practical shrewdness which recognizes the value of per- 
manence and solidity in institutions. They are conservative in 
their fundamental beliefs, in the structure of their governments, 
in their social and domestic usages. They are like a tree whose 
pendulous shoots quiver and rustle with the lightest breeze, while 
its roots enfold the rock with a grasp which storms cannot loosen. 

THE ORIGIN OF THE YOSEMITE 
VALLEY 

JOSIAH DWIGHT WHITNEY 

[From The Yosemite Guide-Book, 1874.] 

All will recognize in the Yosemite a peculiar and unique type 
of scenery. Cliffs absolutely vertical, like the upper portions of 
the Half Dome and El Capitan, and of such immense height as 



JO SI AH DWIGHT WHITNEY 22/ 

these, are, so far as we know, to be seen nowhere else. The dome 
form of mountains is exhibited on a grand scale in other parts of 
the Sierra Nevada ; but there is no Half Dome, even among the 
stupendous precipices at the head of the King's River. No one 
can avoid asking, What is the origin of this peculiar type of scen- 
ery ? How has this unique valley been formed, and what are tlie 
geological causes which have produced its wonderful cliffs, and all 
the other features which combine to make this locality so remark- 
able ? These questions we will endeavor to answer, as well as our 
ability to pry into what went on in the deep-seated regions of the 
earth, in former geological ages, will permit. 

Most of the great canons and valleys of the Sierra Nevada have 
resulted from aqueous denudation, and in no part of the world 
has this kind of work been done on a larger scale. The long- 
continued action of tremendous torrents of water, rushing with 
impetuous velocity down the slopes of the mountains, has exca- 
vated those immense gorges by which the chain of the Sierra 
Nevada is furrowed, on its western slope, to the depth of thou- 
sands of feet. This erosion, great as it is, has been done within a 
comparatively recent period, geologically speaking, as is conclu- 
sively demonstrated in numerous localities. At the Abbey's Ferry 
crossing of the Stanislaus, for instance, a portion of the mass of 
Table Mountain is seen on each side of the river, in such a posi- 
tion as to demonstrate that the current of the lava which forms 
the summit of this mountain once flowed continuously across 
what is now a caiion over 2000 feet deep, showing that the 
erosion of that immense gorge has all been effected since the 
lava flowed down from the higher portion of the Sierra. This 
event took place, as we know from the fossil bones and plants 
embedded under the volcanic mass, at a very recent geological 
period, or in the latter part of the Tertiary epoch, and after the 
appearance of man on the earth. 

The eroded canons of the Sierra, however, whose formation is 
due to the action of water, never have vertical walls, nor do their 
sides present the peculiar angular forms which are seen in the 
Yosem'te, as, for instance, in El Capitan, where two perpendic- 
ular surfaces of smooth granite, more than 3000 feet high, 
meet each other at a right angle. It is sufficient to look for a 



228 THE ORIGIN OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 

moment at the vertical faces of El Capitan and the Bridal Veil 
Rock, turned down the Valley, or away from the direction in 
which the eroding forces must have acted, to be able to say that 
aqueous erosion could not have been the agent employed to do 
any such work. The squarely cut re-entering angles, like those 
below El Capitan, and between Cathedral Rock and the Sentinel, 
or in the Illilouette caiion, were never produced by ordinary ero- 
sion. Much less could any such cause be called in to account for 
the peculiar formation of the Half Dome, the vertical portion of 
which is all above the ordinary level of the walls of the Valley, 
rising 2000 feet, in sublime isolation, above any point which 
could have been reached by denuding agencies, even supposing 
the current of water to have filled the whole Valley, 

Much less can it be supposed that the peculiar form of the 
Yosemite is due to the erosive action of ice. A more absurd the- 
ory was never advanced than that by which it was sought to 
ascribe to glaciers the sawing out of these vertical walls, and the 
rounding of the domes. Nothing more unlike the real work of 
ice, as exhibited in the Alps, could be found. Besides, there is 
no reason to suppose, or at least no proof, that glaciers have ever 
occupied the Valley or any portion of it, as will be explained in 
the next chapter ; so that this theory, based on entire ignorance 
of the whole subject, may be dropped without wasting any more 
time upon it. 

The theory of erosion not being admissible to account for the 
formation of the Yosemite Valley, we have to fall back on some 
one of those movements of the earth's crust to which the primal 
forms of mountain valleys are due. The forces which have acted 
to produce valleys are complex in their nature, and it is not easy 
to classify the forms which have resulted from them in a satisfac- 
tory manner. The two principal types of valleys, however, are 
those produced by rents or fissures in the crust, and those resulting 
from flexures or foldings of the strata. The former are usually 
transverse to the mountain chain in which they occur ; the latter 
are more frequently parallel to them, and parallel to the general 
strike of the strata of which the mountains are made up. Valleys 
which have originated in cross fractures are usually very narrow 
defiles, enclosed within steep walls of rocks, the steepness of the 



JOSIAH D WIGHT WHITNEY 229 

walls increasing with the hardness of the rock. It would be dififi- 
cult to point to a good example of this kind of valley in California ; 
the famous defile of the Via Mala in Switzerland is one of the best 
which could be cited. Valleys formed by foldings of the strata 
are very common in many mountain chains, especially in those 
typical ones, the Jura and the Appalachian. Many of the valleys 
of the Coast Ranges are of this order. A valley formed in either 
one of the ways suggested above may be modified afterwards by 
forces pertaining to either of the others \ thus a valley originating 
in a transverse fissure may afterwards become much modified by an 
erosive agency, or a longitudinal flexure valley may have one of 
its sides raised up or let down by a " fault " or line of fissure run- 
ning through or across it. 

If we examine the Yosemite to see if traces of an origin in 
either of the above ways can be detected there, we obtain a 
negative answer. The Valley is too wide to have been formed 
by a fissure ; it is about as wide as it is deep, and, if it had been 
originally a simple crack, the walls must have been moved bodily 
away from each other, carrying the whole chain of the Sierra 
with them, to one side or the other, or both, for the distance of 
half a mile. Besides, when a cliff has been thus formed, there 
will be no difBculty in recognizing the fact, from the corre- 
spondence of the outlines of the two sides ; just as, when we 
break a stone in two, the pieces must necessarily admit of being 
fitted together again. No correspondence of the two sides of 
the Yosemite can be detected, nor will the most ingenious con- 
triving, or lateral moving, suffice to bring them into anything 
like adaptation to each other. A square recess on one side is 
met on the other, not by a corresponding projection, but by a 
plain wall or even another cavity. These facts are sufficient to 
make the adoption of the theory of a rent or fissure impossible. 
There is much the same difficulty in conceiving of the formation 
of the Valley by any fliexure or folding process. The forms and 
outlines of the masses of rock limiting it are too angular, and 
have too little development in any one direction ; they are cut 
off squarely at the upper end, where the ascent to the general 
level of the country is by gigantic steps, and not by a gradual 
rise. The direction of the Valley, too, is transverse to the gen- 



230 THE ORIGIN OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 

eral line of elevation of the mountains, and not parallel with it, 
as it should be, roughly at least, were it the result of folding or 
upheaval. 

In short, we are led irresistibly to the adoption of a theory of 
the origin of the Yosemite Valley in a way which has hardly yet 
been recognized as one of those in which valleys may be formed, 
probably for the reason that there are so few cases in which 
such an event can be absolutely proved to have occurred. We 
conceive that, during the process of upheaval of the Sierra, or, 
possibly, at some time after that had taken place, there was 
at the Yosemite a subsidence of a limited area, marked by lines 
of " fault" or fissures crossing each other somewhat nearly at 
right angles. In other and more simple language, the bottom 
of the Valley sank down to an unknown depth, owing to its 
support being withdrawn from underneath during some of those 
convulsive movements which must have attended the upheaval 
of so extensive and elevated a chain, no matter how slow we 
may imagine the process to have been. Subsidence, over ex- 
tensive areas, of portions of the earth's crust, is not at all a new 
idea in geology, and there is nothing in this peculiar application 
of it which need excite surprise. It is the great amount of 
vertical displacement for the small area implicated which makes 
this a peculiar case ; but it would not be easy to give any good 
reason why such an exceptional result should not be brought 
about, amid the complicated play of forces which the elevation 
of a great mountain chain must set in motion. 

By the adoption of the subsidence theory for the formation 
of the Yosemite, we are able to get over one difficulty which 
appears insurmountable with any other. This is, the very small 
amount of debris at the base of the cliffs, and even, at a few 
points, its entire absence, as previously noticed in our descrip- 
tion of' the Valley. We see that fragments of rocks are loos- 
ened by rain, frost, gravity, and other natural causes, along the 
walls, and probably not a winter elapses that some great mass 
of detritus does not come thundering down from above, adding, 
as it is easy to see from actual inspection of those slides which 
have occurred within the past few years, no inconsiderable 
amount to the talus. Several of these great rock-avalanches 



JO SI AH D WIGHT WHITNEY 23 1 

have taken place since the Valley was inhabited. One which 
fell near Cathedral Rock is said to have shaken the Valley like 
an earthquake. This abrasion of the edges of the Valley has 
unquestionably been going on during a vast period of time ; what 
has become of the detrital material ? Some masses of granites 
now lying in the Valley — one in particular near the base of the 
Yosemite Fall — are as large as houses. Such masses as these 
could never have been removed from the Valley by currents of 
water ; in fact, there is no evidence of any considerable amount 
of aqueous erosion, for the canon of the Merced below the 
Yosemite is nearly free from detritus, all the way down to the 
plain. The falling masses have not been carried out by a gla- 
cier, for there are below the Valley no remains of the moraines 
which such an operation could not fail to have formed. 

It appears to us that there is no way of disposing of the vast 
mass of detritus, which must have fallen from the walls of the 
Yosemite since the formation of the Valley, except by assuming 
that it has gone down to fill the abyss, which was opened by the 
subsidence which our theory supposes to have taken place. 
What the depth of the chasm may have been we have no data 
for computing ; but that it must have been very great is proved 
by the fact that it has been able to receive the accumulation of 
so long a period of time. The cavity was, undoubtedly, occu- 
pied by water, forming a lake of unsurpassed beauty and gran- 
deur, until quite a recent epoch. The gradual desiccation of 
the whole country, the disappearance of the glaciers, and the 
filling up of the abyss to nearly a level with the present outlet, 
where the Valley passes into a cafion of the usual form, have 
converted the lake into a valley with a river meandering through 
it. The process of filling up still continues, and the talus will 
accumulate perceptibly fast, although a long time must elapse 
before the general appearance of the Valley will be much altered 
by this cause, so stupendous is the vertical height of its walls, 
and so slow their crumbling away, at least as compared with the 
historic duration of time. 

Lake Tahoe and the valley which it partly occupies we con- 
ceive also to be, like the Yosemite, the result of local subsidence. 
It has evidently not been produced by erosion ; its depth below 



232 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

the mountains on each side, amounting to as much as 3000 
feet, forbids this idea, as do also its Hmited area and its 
parallelism with the axis of the chain. The Lake is still very 
deep, over 1000 feet; but how deep it was originally, and how 
much detritus has been carried into it, we have no data for even 
crudely estimating. 



ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

A LECTURE TO WORKING MEN 

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

[From Lay Sermons, Addresses, a ttd Reviews, 1870.] 

If a well were to be sunk at our feet in the midst of the city 
of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work 
in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with 
which we are all familiar as "chalk." 

Not only here, but over the whole country of Norfolk, the 
well-sinker might carry his shaft down many hundred feet with- 
out coming to the end of the chalk ; and, on the sea-coast, where 
the waves have pared away the face of the land which breasts 
them, the scarped faces of the high cliffs are often w^holly formed 
of the same material. Northward, the chalk may be followed as 
far as Yorkshire ; on the south coast it appears abruptly in the 
picturesque western bays of Dorset, and breaks into the Needles 
of the Isle of Wight ; while on the shores of Kent it supplies 
that long line of white cliffs to which England owes her name 
of Albion. 

Were 'the thin soil which covers it all washed away, a curved 
band of white chalk, here broader, and there narrower, might be 
followed diagonally across England from Lulworth in Dorset, to 
Flamborough Head in Yorkshire — a distance of over 280 miles 
as the crow flies. 

From this land to the North Sea, on the east, and the Chan- 
nel, on the south, the chalk is largely hidden by other deposits ; 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 



233 



but, except in the Weald of Kent and Sussex, it enters into the 
very foundations of all the south-eastern counties. 

Attaining, as it does in some places, a thickness of more than 
a thousand feet, the English chalk must be admitted to be a 
mass of considerable magnitude. Nevertheless, it covers but 
an insignificant portion of the whole area occupied by the chalk 
formation of the globe, which has precisely the same general 
characters as ours, and is found in detached patches, some less, 
and others more extensive, than the English. 

Chalk occurs in north-west Ireland ; it stretches over a large 
part of France, — the chalk which underlies Paris being, in 
fact, a continuation of that of the London basin ; it runs through 
Denmark and Central Europe, and extends southward to North 
Africa ; while eastward, it appears in the Crimea and in Syria, 
and may be traced as far as the shores of the Sea of Aral, in 
Central Asia. 

If all the points at which true chalk occurs were circum- 
scribed, they would lie within an irregular oval about 3000 
miles in long diameter — the area of which would be as great 
as that of Europe, and would many times exceed that of the 
largest existing inland sea — the Mediterranean. 

Thus the chalk is no unimportant element in the masonry of 
the earth's crust, and it impresses a peculiar stamp, varying with 
the conditions to which it is exposed, on the scenery of the dis- 
tricts in which it occurs. The undulating downs, and rounded 
coombs, covered with sweet-grassed turf, of our inland chalk 
country, have a peacefully domestic and mutton-suggesting 
prettiness, but can hardly be called either grand or beautiful. 
But on our southern coasts, the wall-sided cliffs, many hundred 
feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles standing out in the 
sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve as perches for the wary 
cormorant, confer a wonderful beauty and grandeur upon the 
chalk headlands. And, in the East, chalk has its share in the 
formation of some of the most venerable of mountain ranges, 
such as the Lebanon. 

What is this wide-spread component of the surface of the 
earth ? and whence did it come ? 



234 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

You may think this is no very hopeful inquiry. You may not 
unnaturally suppose that the attempt to solve such problems as 
these can lead to no result, save that of entangling the inquirer 
in vague speculations, incapable of refutation and of verification. 

If such were really the case, I should have selected some 
other subject than a " piece of chalk " for my discourse. But, 
in truth, after much deliberation, I have been unable to think 
of any topic which Avould so well enable me to lead you to 
see how solid is the foundation upon which some of the most 
startling conclusions of physical science rest. 

A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the 
chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported 
by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence 
as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history 
of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own 
eyes, to-night. 

Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more 
profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well 
when I assert, that the man who should know the true history 
of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his 
breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, 
if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have 
a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful uni- 
verse, and of man's relation to it, than the most learned student 
who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of 
those of Nature. 

The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not nearly so 
hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the broad features of 
the story it has to tell ; and I propose that we now set to work 
to spell that story out together. 

We all know that if we " burn " chalk the result is quicklime. 
Chalk, in fact, is a compound of carbonic acid gas, and lime, 
and when you make it very hot the carbonic acid flies away and 
the lime is left. 

By this method of procedure we see the lime, but we do not 
see the carbonic acid. If, on the other hand, you were to pow- 
der a little chalk and drop it into a good deal of strong vinegar, 
there would be a great bubbling and fizzing, and, finally, a clear 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 235 

liquid, in which no sign of chalk would appear. Here you see 
the carbonic acid in the bubbles ; the lime, dissolved in the vine- 
gar, vanishes from sight. There are a great many other ways 
of showing that chalk is essentially nothing but carbonic acid 
and quicklime. Chemists enunciate the result of all the experi- 
ments which prove this, by stating that chalk is almost wholly 
composed of " carbonate of lime." 

It is desirable for us to start from the knowledge of this fact, 
though it may not seem to help us very far towards what we 
seek. For carbonate of lime is a widely-spread substance, and 
is met with under very various conditions. All sorts of lime- 
stone are composed of more or less pure carbonate of lime. 
The crust which is often deposited by waters which have drained 
through limestone rocks, in the form of what are called stalag- 
mites and stalactites, is carbonate of lime. Or, to take a more 
familiar example, the fur on the inside of a tea-kettle is carbo- 
nate of lime ; and, for anything chemistry tells us to the contrary, 
the chalk might be a kind of gigantic fur upon the bottom of 
the earth-kettle, which is kept pretty hot below. 

Let us try another method of making the chalk tell its own 
history. To the unassisted eye chalk looks simply like a very 
loose and open kind of stone. But it is possible to grind a slice 
of chalk down so thin that you can see through it — until it is 
thin enough, in fact, to be examined with any magnifying power 
that may be thought desirable. A thin slice of the fur of a 
kettle might be made in the same way. If it were examined 
microscopically, it would show itself to be a more or less dis- 
tinctly laminated mineral substance, and nothing more. 

But the slice of chalk presents a totally different appearance 
when placed under the microscope. The general mass of it 
is made up of very minute granules ; but, imbedded in this 
matrix, are innumerable bodies, some smaller and some larger, 
but, on a rough average, not more than a hundredth of an inch 
in diameter, having a well-defined shape and structure. A 
cubic inch of some specimens of chalk may contain hundreds 
of thousands of these bodies, compacted together with incalcu- 
lable millions of the granules. 

The examination of a transparent slice gives a good notion of 



236 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

the manner in which the components of the chalk are arranged, 
and of their relative proportions. But, by rubbing up some 
chalk with a brush in water and then pouring off the milky 
fluid, so as to obtain sediments of different degrees of fineness, 
the granules and the minute rounded bodies may be pretty well 
separated from one another, and submitted to microscopic 
examination, either as opaque or as transparent objects. By 
combining the views obtained in these various methods, each 
of the rounded bodies may be proved to be a beavitifully-con- 
structed calcareous fabric, made up of a number of chambers, 
communicating freely with one another. The chambered bodies 
are of various forms. One of the commonest is something like 
a badly-grown raspberry, being formed of a number of nearly 
globular chambers of different sizes congregated together. It 
is called Globigerina, and some specimens of chalk consist of 
little else than Globigermce and granules. 

Let us fix our attention upon the Globigerina. It is the spoor 
of the game we are tracking. If we can learn what it is and 
what are the conditions of its existence, we shall see our way 
to the origin and past history of the chalk, 

A suggestion which may naturally enough present itself is, 
that these curious bodies are the result of some process of 
aggregation which has taken place in the carbonate of lime ; 
that, just as in winter, the rime on our windows simulates the 
most delicate and elegantly arborescent foliage — proving that 
the mere mineral water may, under certain conditions, assume 
the outward form of organic bodies — so this mineral substance, 
carbonate of lime, hidden away in the bowels of the earth, has 
taken the shape of these chambered bodies. I am not raising 
a merely fanciful and unreal objection. Very learned men, in 
former days, have even entertained the notion that all the 
formed things found in rocks are of this nature ; and if no such 
conception is at present held to be admissible, it is because long 
and varied experience has now shown that mineral matter 
never does assume the form and structure we find in fossils. 
If any one were to try to persuade you that an oyster-shell 
(which is also chiefly composed of carbonate of lime) had 
crystallized out of sea-water, I suppose you would laugh at the 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 237 

absurdity. Your laughter would be justified by the fact that all 
experience tends to show that oyster-shells are formed by the 
agency of oysters, and in no other way. And if there were no 
better reasons, we should be justified, on like grounds, in be- 
lieving that Globigcrina is not the product of anything but 
vital activity. 

Happily, however, better evidence in proof of the organic 
nature of the Globigcrince than that of analogy is forthcoming. 
It so happens that calcareous skeletons, exactly similar to the 
Globigcrince of the chalk, are being formed, at the present 
moment, by minute living creatures, which flourish in multitudes, 
literally more numerous than the sands of the sea-shore, over a 
large extent of that part of the earth's surface which is covered 
by the ocean. 

The history of the discovery of these living GIobigerincE, and 
of the part which they play in rock building, is singular enough. 
It is a discovery which, like others of no less scientific impor- 
tance, has arisen, incidentally, out of work devoted to very dif- 
ferent and exceedingly practical interests. 

When men first took to the sea, they speedily learned to look 
out for shoals and rocks ; and the more the burthen of their 
ships increased, the more imperatively necessary it became for 
sailors to ascertain with precision the depth of the waters they 
traversed. Out of this necessity grew the use of the lead and 
sounding line ; and, ultimately, marine-surveying, which is the 
recording of the form of coasts and of the depth of the sea, as 
ascertained by the sounding-lead, upon charts. 

At the same time, it became desirable to ascertain and to 
indicate the nature of the sea-bottom, since this circumstance 
greatly affects its goodness as holding ground for anchors. 
Some ingenious tar, whose name deserves a better fate than the 
oblivion into which it has fallen, attained this object by " arm- 
ing " the bottom of the lead with a lump of grease, to which 
more or less of the sand or mud, or broken shells, as the case 
might be, adhered, and was brought to the surface. But, how- 
ever well adapted such an apparatus might be for rough nauti- 
cal purposes, scientific accuracy could not be expected from the 
armed lead, and to remedy its defects (especially when applied 



238 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

to sounding in great depths) Lieut. Brooke, of the American 
Navy, some years ago invented a most ingenious machine, by 
which a considerable portion of the superficial layer of the sea- 
bottom can be scooped out and brought up, from any depth to 
which the lead descends. 

In 1853, Lieut. Brooke obtained mud from the bottom of 
the North Atlantic, between Newfoundland and the Azores, at 
a depth of more than 10,000 feet, or two miles, by the help of 
this sounding apparatus. The specimens were sent for exami- 
nation to Ehrenberg of Berlin, and to Bailey of West Point, 
and those able microscopists found that this deep-sea mud 
was almost entirely composed of the skeletons of living organ- 
isms — the greater proportion of these being just like the Globi- 
geri/ice already known to occur in the chalk. 

Thus far, the work had been carried on simply in the inter- 
ests of science, but Lieut. Brooke's method of sounding ac- 
quired a high commercial value, when the enterprise of laying 
down the telegraph-cable between this country and the United 
States was undertaken. For it became a matter of immense 
importance to know, not only the depth of the sea over the 
whole line along which the cable was to be laid, but the exact 
nature of the bottom, so as to guard against chances of cutting 
or fraying the strands of that costly rope. The Admiralty con- 
sequently ordered Captain Dayman, an old friend and ship- 
mate of mine, to ascertain the depth over the whole line of the 
cable, and to bring back specimens of the bottom. In former 
days, such a command as this might have sounded very much 
like one of the impossible things which the young prince in the 
Fairy Tales is ordered to do before he can obtain the hand of the 
princess. However, in the months of June and July, 1857, my 
friend performed the task assigned to him with great expedition 
and precision, without, so far as I know, having met with any 
reward of that kind. The specimens of Atlantic mud which he 
procured were sent to me to be examined and reported upon. 

The result of all these operations is, that we know the con- 
tours and the nature of the surface-soil ' covered by the North 
Atlantic, for a distance of 1700 miles from east to west, as well 
as we know that of any part of the dry land. 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 239 

It is a prodigious plain — one of the widest and most even 
plains in the world. If the sea were drained off, you might 
drive a wagon all the way from Valentia, on the west coast of 
Ireland, to Trinity Bay, in Newfoundland. And, except upon 
one sharp incline about 200 miles from Valentia, I am not 
quite sure that it would even be necessary to put the skid on, 
so gentle are the ascents and descents upon that long route. 
From Valentia the road would lie down-hill for about 200 miles 
to the point at which the bottom is now covered by 1700 
fathoms of sea-water. Then would come the central plain, 
more than 1000 miles wide, the inequalities of the surface of 
which would be hardly perceptible, though the depth of water 
upon it now varies from 10,000 to 15,000 feet; and there are 
places in which Mont Blanc might be sunk without showing its 
peak above water. Beyond this, the ascent on the American 
side commences, and gradually leads, for about 300 miles, to 
the Newfoundland shore. 

Almost the whole of the bottom of this central plain (which 
extends for many hundred miles in a north and south direction) 
is covered by a fine mud, which, when brought to the surface, 
dries into a greyish-white friable substance. You can write 
with this on a blackboard, if you are so inclined ; and, to the 
eye, it is quite like very soft, greyish chalk. Examined chemi- 
cally, it proves to be composed almost wholly of carbonate of 
lime ; and if you make a section of it, in the same way as that of 
the piece of chalk was made, and view it with the microscope, it 
presents innumerable G^/c/;/^6'r/>/^ embedded in a granular matrix. 

Thus this deep-sea mud is substantially chalk. I say substan- 
tially, because there are a good many minor differences ; but as 
these have no bearing on the question immediately before us, — 
which is the nature of the GlobigerincB of the chalk, — it is unnec- 
essary to speak of them. 

GlobigerincB of every size, from the smallest to the largest, are 
associated together in the Atlantic mud, and the chambers of 
many are filled by a soft animal matter. This soft substance 
is, in fact, the remains of the creature to which the Globigeiina 
shell, or rather skeleton, owes its existence — and which is an 
animal of the simplest imaginable description. It is, in fact, a 



240 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

mere particle of living jelly, without defined parts of any kind — 
without a mouth, nerves, muscles, or distinct organs, and only 
manifesting its vitality to ordinary observation by thrusting out 
and retracting from all parts of its surface, long filamentous 
processes, which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous 
particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher animals, we 
call organs, is capable of feeding, growing, and multiplying ; of 
separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate 
of lime which is dissolved in sea water ; and of building up that 
substance into a skeleton for itself, according to a pattern which 
can be imitated by no other known agency. 

The notion that animals can live and flourish in the sea, at 
the vast depths from which apparently living G/obigeriim have 
been brought up, does not agree very well with our usual con- 
ceptions respecting the conditions of animal life ; and it is not 
so absolutely impossible as it might at first sight appear to be, 
that the GlobigerincK of the Atlantic sea-bottom do not live and 
die where they are found. 

As I have mentioned, the soundings from the great Atlantic 
plain are almost entirely made up of Globigerince, with the 
granules which have been mentioned, and some few other cal- 
careous shells ; but a small percentage of the chalky mud — per- 
haps at most some five per cent, of it — is of a different nature, 
and consists of shells and skeletons composed of silex, or pure 
flint. These silicious bodies belong partly to the lowly vege- 
table organisms which are called Diatof?tacece, and partly to the 
minute, and extremely simple, animals, termed Radiolaria. It 
is quite certain that these creatures do not live at the bottom 
of the ocean, but at its surface — where they may be obtained in 
prodigious numbers by the use of a properly constructed net. 
Hence it follows that these silicious organisms, though they are 
not heavier than the lightest dust, must have fallen, in some 
cases, through fifteen thousand feet of water, before they reached 
their final resting-place on the ocean-floor. And, considering 
how large a surface these bodies expose in proportion to their 
weight, it is probable that they occupy a great length of time in 
making their burial journey from the surface of the Atlantic 
to the bottom. 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 24 1 

But if the Radiolaria and Diatoms are thus rained upon the 
bottom of the sea, from the superficial layer of its waters in 
which they pass their lives, it is obviously possible that the 
Globigerince may be similarly derived ; and if they were so, it 
would be much more easy to understand how they obtain their 
supply of food than it is at present. Nevertheless, the positive 
and negative evidence all points the other way. The skeletons 
of the full-grown, deep-sea Globigerinoi are so remarkably solid 
and heavy in proportion to their surface as to seem little fitted 
for floating ; and, as a matter of fact, they are not to be found 
along with the Diatoms and Radiolaria, in the uppermost stratum 
of the open ocean. 

It has been observed, again, that the abundance of Globigeri?ice, 
in proportion to other organisms, of like kind, increases with 
the depth of the sea; and that deep-water Globigerince are 
larger than those which live in shallower parts of the sea ; 
and such facts negative the supposition that these organisms 
have been swept by currents from the shallows into the deeps 
of the Atlantic. 

It therefore seems to be hardly doubtful that these wonderful 
creatures live and die at the depths in which they are found. 

However, the important points for us are, that the living 
Globigerince are exclusively marine animals, the skeletons of 
which abound at the bottom of deep seas ; and that there is not 
a shadow of reason for believing that the habits of the Globi- 
gcrincE. of the chalk differed from those of the existing species. 
But if this be true, there is no escaping the conclusion that the 
chalk itself is the dried mud of an ancient deep sea. 

In working over the soundings collected by Captain Dayman, 
I was surprised to find that many of what I have called the 
" granules " of that mud, were not, as one might have been 
tempted to think at first, the mere powder and waste of Globi- 
gerince, but that they had a definite form and size. I termed 
these bodies " coccoliths,'' and doubted their organic nature. Dr. 
Wallich verified my observation, and added the interesting dis- 
covery that, not unfrequently, bodies similar to these " coccoliths " 
were aggregated together into spheroids, which he termed " coc- 
cospheres .'''' So far as we knew, these bodies, the nature of which 



242 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

is extremely puzzling and problematical, were peculiar to the 
Atlantic soundings. 

But, a few years ago, Mr. Sorby, in making a careful exami- 
nation of the chalk by means of thin sections and otherwise, 
observed, as Ehrenberg had done before him, that much of its 
granular basis possesses a definite form. Comparing these 
formed particles with those in the Atlantic soundings, he found 
the two to be identical ; and thus proved that the chalk, like the 
soundings, contains these mysterious coccoliths and coccospheres. 
Here was a further and a most interesting confirmation, from in- 
ternal evidence, of the essential identity of the chalk with modern 
deep-sea mud. Globigeriiice, coccoliths, and coccospheres are 
found as the chief constituents of both, and testify to the general 
similarity of the conditions under which both have been formed. 

The evidence furnished by the hewing, facing, and superposi- 
tion of the stones of the Pyramids, that these structures were 
built by men, has no greater weight than the evidence that the 
chalk was built by Globigerince ; and the belief that those ancient 
pyramid-builders were terrestrial and air-breathing creatures like 
ourselves, is not better based than the conviction that the chalk- 
makers lived in the sea. 

But as our belief in the building of the Pyramids by men is 
not only grounded on the internal evidence afforded by these 
structures, but gathers strength from multitudinous collateral 
proofs, and is clinched by the total absence of any reason for a 
a contrary belief ; so the evidence drawn from the Globigerince 
that the chalk is an ancient sea-bottom, is fortified by innumer- 
able independent lines of evidence ; and our belief in the truth 
of the conclusion to which all positive testimony tends, receives 
the like negative justification from the fact that no other hypothe- 
sis has a shadow of foundation. 

It may be worth while briefly to consider a few of these col- 
lateral proofs that the chalk was deposited at the bottom of the sea. 

The great mass of the chalk is composed, as we have seen, of 
the skeletons of Globigerince, and other simple organisms, im- 
bedded in granular matter. Here and there, however, this 
hardened mud of the ancient sea reveals the remains of higher 
animals which have lived and died, and left their hard parts in 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 



243 



the mud, just as the oysters die and leave their shells behind 
them, in the mud of the present seas. 

There are, at the present day, certain groups of animals which 
are never found in fresh waters, being unable to live anywhere 
but in the sea. Such are the corals ; those corallines which are 
called Polyzoa ; those creatures which fabricate the lamp-shells, 
and are called Brachiopoda ; the pearly Nautilus, and all animals 
allied to it ; and all the forms of sea-urchins and star-fishes. 

Not only are all these creatures confined to salt water at the 
present time ; but, so far as our records of the past go, the con- 
ditions of their existence have been the same : hence, their 
occurrence in any deposit is as strong evidence as can be ob- 
tained that that deposit was formed in the sea. Now the 
remains of animals of all the kinds which have been enumerated, 
occur in the chalk, in greater or less abundance ; while not one 
of those forms of shell-fish which are characteristic of fresh 
water has yet been observed in it. 

When we consider that the remains of more than three thou- 
sand distinct species of aquatic animals have been discovered 
among the fossils of the chalk, that the great majority of them 
are of such forms as are now met with only in the sea, and that 
there is no reason to believe that any one of them inhabited 
fresh water — the collateral evidence that the chalk represents 
an ancient sea-bottom acquires as great force as the proof de- 
rived from the nature of the chalk itself. I think you will now 
allow that I did not overstate my case when I asserted that we 
have as strong grounds for believing that all the vast area of dry 
land, at present occupied by the chalk, was once at the bottom of 
the sea, as we have for any matter of history whatever ; while 
there is no justification for any other belief. 

No less certain it is that the time during which the countries 
we now call south-east England, France, Germany, Poland, Rus- 
sia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, were more or less completely covered 
by a deep sea, was of considerable duration. 

We have already seen that the chalk is, in places, more than a 
thousand feet thick. I think you will agree with me, that it 
must have taken some time for the skeletons of animalcules of 
a hundredth of an inch in diameter to heap up such a mass as 



244 



ON A PIECE OF CHALK 



that. I have said that throughout the thickness of the chalk 
the remains of other animals are scattered. These remains are 
often in the most exquisite state of preservation. The valves of 
the shell-fishes are commonly adherent ; the long spines of some 
of the sea-urchins, which would be detached by the smallest jar, 
often remain in their places. In a word, it is certain that these 
animals have lived and died when the place which they now 
occupy was the surface of as much of the chalk as had then 
been deposited ; and that each has been covered up by the layer 
of Globigerina mud, upon which the creatures imbedded a little 
higher up have, in like manner, lived and died. But some of 
these remains prove the existence of reptiles of vast size in the 
chalk sea. These lived their time, and had their ancestors and 
descendants, which assuredly implies time, reptiles being of slow 
growth. 

There is more curious evidence, again, that the process of 
covering up, or, in other words, the deposit of Globigerina skele- 
tons, did not go on very fast. It is demonstrable that an ani- 
mal of the cretaceous sea might die, that its skeleton might lie 
uncovered upon the sea-bottom long enough to lose all its out- 
ward coverings and appendages by putrefaction ; and that, after 
this had happened, another animal might attach itself to the 
dead and naked skeleton, might grow to maturity, and might 
itself die before the calcareous mud had buried the whole. 

Cases of this kind are admirably described by Sir Charles 
Lyell. He speaks of the frequency with which geologists find 
in the chalk a fossilized sea-urchin, to which is attached the 
lower valve of a Crania. This is a kind of shell-fish, with a shell 
composed of two pieces, of which, as in the oyster, one is fixed 
and the other free. 

" The upper valve is almost invariably wanting, though occa- 
sionally found in a perfect state of preservation in the white 
chalk at some distance. In this case, we see clearly that the 
sea-urchin first lived from youth to age, then died and lost its 
spines, which were carried away. Then the young Crania ad- 
hered to the bared shell, grew and pferished in its turn ; after 
which, the upper valve was separated from the lower, before the 
Echinus became enveloped in chalky mud." 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 245 

A specimen in the Museum of Practical Geology, in London, 
still further prolongs the period which must have elapsed be- 
tween the death of the sea-urchin, and its burial by the Globi- 
gerincz. For the outward face of the valve of a Cra?im, which 
is attached to a sea-urchin {Micraster) is itself overrun by an 
incrusting coralline, which spreads thence over more or less of 
the surface of the sea-urchin. It follows that, after the upper 
valve of the Crania fell off, the surface of the attached valve 
must have remained exposed long enough to allow the growth of 
the whole coralline, since corallines do not live imbedded in mud. 

The progress of knowledge may, one day, enable us to deduce 
from such facts as these the maximum rate at which the chalk 
can have accumulated, and thus to arrive at the minimum dura- 
tion of the chalk period. Suppose that the valve of the Crania 
upon which a coralline has fixed itself in the way just described, 
is so attached to the sea-urchin that no part of it is more than 
an inch above the face upon which the sea-urchin rests. Then, 
as the coralline could not have fixed itself, if the Crania had 
been covered up with chalk mud, and could not have lived had 
itself been so covered, it follows, that an inch of chalk mud 
could not have accumulated within the time between the death 
and decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin and the growth of 
the coralline to the full size which it has attained. If the decay 
of the soft parts of the sea-urchin ; the attachment, growth to 
maturity, and decay of the Crania ; and the subsequent attach- 
ment and growth of the coralline, took a year (which is a low esti- 
mate enough), the accumulation of the inch of chalk must have 
taken more than a year : and the depth of a thousand feet of 
chalk must, consequently, have taken more than twelve thou- 
sand years. 

The foundation of all this calculation is, of course, a knowl- 
edge of the length of time the Crania and the coralline needed 
to attain their full size ; and, on this head, precise knowledge is 
at present wanting. But there are circumstances which tend to 
show, that nothing like an inch of chalk has accumulated during 
the life of a Crania ; and, on any probable estimate of the length 
of that life, the chalk period must have had a much longer dura- 
tion than that thus roughly assigned to it. 



246 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

Thus, not only is it certain that the chalk is the mud of an 
ancient sea-bottom ; but it is no less certain, that the chalk sea 
existed during an extremely long period, though we may not be 
prepared to give a precise estimate of the length of that period 
in years. The relative duration is clear, though the absolute 
duration may not be definable. The attempt to affix any precise 
date to the period at which the chalk sea began, or ended, its 
existence, is baffled by difficulties of the same kind. But the 
relative age of the cretaceous epoch may be determined with 
as great ease and certainty as the long duration of that epoch. 

You will have heard of the interesting discoveries recently 
made, in various parts of Western Europe, of flint implements, 
obviously worked into shape by human hands, under circum- 
stances which show conclusively that man is a very ancient 
denizen of these regions. 

It has been proved that the old populations of Europe, whose 
existence nas been revealed to us in this way, consisted of sav- 
ages, such as the Esquimaux are now ; that, in the country 
which is now France, they hunted the reindeer, and were famil- 
iar with the mammoth and the bison. The physical geography 
of France was in those days different from what it is now — the 
river Somme, for instance, having cut its bed a hundred feet 
deeper between that time and this ; and it is probable that the 
climate was more like that of Canada or Siberia, than that of 
Western Europe. 

The existence of these people is forgotten even in the tradi- 
tions of the oldest historical nations. The name and fame of 
them had utterly vanished until a few years back; and the 
amount of physical change which has been effected since their 
day, renders it more than probable that, venerable as are some 
of the historical nations, the workers of the chipped flints of 
Hoxn^ or of Amiens are to them, as they are to us, in point of 
antiquity. 

But, if we assign to these hoar relics of long-vanished genera- 
tions of men the greatest age that can possibly be claimed for 
them, they are not older than the drift, or boulder clay, which, 
in comparison with the chalk, is but a very juvenile deposit. 
You need go no further than your own sea-board for evidence 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 247 

of this fact. At one of the most charming spots on the coast of 
Norfolk, Cromer, you will see the boulder clay forming a vast 
mass, which lies upon the chalk, and must consequently have 
come into existence after it. Huge boulders of chalk are, in 
fact, included in the clay, and have evidently been brought to 
the position they now occupy, by the same agency as that which 
has planted blocks of syenite from Norway side by side with 
them. 

The chalk, then, is certainly older than the boulder clay. If 
you ask how much, I will again take you no further than the 
same spot upon your own coasts for evidence. I have spoken 
of the boulder clay and drift as resting upon the chalk. That 
is not strictly true. Interposed between the chalk and the drift 
is a comparatively insignificant layer, containing vegetable mat- 
ter. But that layer tells a wonderful history. It is full of 
stumps of trees standing as they grew. Fir-trees are there with 
their cones, and hazel-bushes with their nuts ; there stand the 
stools of oak and yew trees, beeches and alders. Hence this 
stratum is appropriately called the "forest-bed." 

It is obvious that the chalk must have been upheaved and con- 
verted into dry land, before the timber trees could grow upon it. 
As the bolls of some of these trees are from two to three feet in 
diameter, it is no less clear that the dry land thus formed re- 
mained in the same conditions for long ages. And not only 
do the remains of stately oaks and well-grown firs testify to the 
duration of this condition of things, but additional evidence to 
the same effect is afforded by the abundant remains of elephants, 
rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and other great wild beasts, which 
it has yielded to the zealous search of such men as the Rev. Mr. 
Gunn. 

When you look at such a collection as he has formed, and be- 
think you that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their 
owners about, and these great grinders crunch, in the dark 
woods of which the forest-bed is now the only trace, it is impos- 
sible not to feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of 
time as the annual rings of the tree-stumps. 

Thds there is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and 
whoso runs may read it. It tells us, with an authority which 



248 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

cannot be impeached, that the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea 
was raised up, and remained dry land, until it was covered with 
forest, stocked with the great game whose spoils have rejoiced 
your geologists. How long it remained in that condition can- 
not be said ; but " the whirligig of time brought its revenges " 
in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and 
teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden among the 
gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually 
to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses 
of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now 
restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had 
twittered among the topmost twigs of the fir-trees. How long 
this state of things endured we know not, but at length it came 
to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of 
modern Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and the 
beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant ; and at length 
what we call the history of England dawned. 

Thus you have, within the limits of your own country, proof 
that the chalk can justly claim a very much greater antiquity 
than even the oldest physical traces of mankind. But we may 
go further and demonstrate, by evidence of the same authority 
as that which testifies to the existence of the father of men, that 
the chalk is vastly older than Adam himself. 

The Book of Genesis informs us that Adam, immediately upon 
his creation, and before the appearance of Eve, was placed in 
the Garden of Eden. The problem of the geographical position 
of Eden has greatly vexed the spirits of the learned in such mat- 
ters, but there is one point respecting which, so far as I know, 
no commentator has ever raised a doubt. This is, that of the 
four rivers, which are said to run out of it, Euphrates and Hid- 
dekel are identical with the rivers now known by the names of 
Euphrates and Tigris. 

But the whole country in which these mighty rivers take their 
origin, and through which they run, is composed of rocks which 
are either of the same age as the chalk, or of later date. So 
that the chalk must not only have been formed, but, after its 
formation, the time required for the deposit of these later rocks, 
and for their upheaval into dry land, must have elapsed, before 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 249 

the smallest brook which feeds the swift stream of " the great 
river, the river of Babylon," began to flow. 

Thus, evidence which cannot be rebutted, and which need not 
be strengthened, though if time permitted I might indefinitely 
increase its quantity, compels you to believe that the earth, from 
the time of the chalk to the present day, has been the theatre of 
a series of changes as vast in their amount, as they were slow in 
their progress. The area on which we stand has been first sea 
and then land, for at least four alternations ; and has remained 
in each of these conditions for a period of great length. 

Nor have these wonderful metamorphoses of sea into land, 
and of land into sea, been confined to one corner of England. 
During the chalk period, or " cretaceous epoch," not one of the 
present great physical features of the globe was in existence. 
Our great mountain ranges, Pyrenees, Alps, Himalayas, Andes, 
have all been upheaved since the chalk was deposited, and the 
cretaceous sea flowed over the sites of Sinai and Ararat. 

All this is certain, because rocks of cretaceous, or still later, 
date have shared in the elevatory movements which gave rise to 
these mountain chains ; and may be found perched up, in some 
cases, many thousand feet high upon their flanks. And evi- 
dence of equal cogency demonstrates that, though, in Norfolk, 
the forest-bed rests directly upon the chalk, yet it does so, not 
because the period at which the forest grew immediately fol- 
lowed that at which the chalk was formed, but because an im- 
mense lapse of time, represented elsewhere by thousands of feet 
of rock, is not indicated at Cromer. 

I must ask you to believe that there is no less conclusive 
proof that a still more prolonged succession of similar changes 
occurred, before the chalk was deposited. Nor have we any 
reason to think that the first term in the series of these changes 
is known. The oldest sea-beds preserved to us are sands, and 
mud, and pebbles, the wear and tear of rocks which were formed 
in still older oceans. 

But, great as is the magnitude of these physical changes of 
the world, they have been accompanied by a no less striking 
series of modifications in its living inhabitants. 



250 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

All the great classes of animals, beasts of the field, fowls of 
the air, creeping things, and things which dwell in the w^aters, 
flourished upon the globe long ages before the chalk was de- 
posited. Very few, however, if any, of these ancient forms of 
animal life were identical with those which now live. Certainly 
not one of the higher animals was of the same species as any of 
those now in existence. The beasts of the field, in the days 
before the chalk, were not our beasts of the field, nor the fowls 
of the air such as those which the eye of men has seen flying, 
unless his antiquity dates infinitely further back than we at 
present surmise. If we could be carried back into those times, 
we should be as one suddenly set down in Australia before it 
was colonized. We should see mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, 
insects, snails, and the like, clearly recognisable as such, and 
yet not one of them would be just the same as those with which 
we are familiar, and many would be extremely different. 

From that time to the present, the population of the world has 
undergone slow and gradual, but incessant changes. There has 
been no grand catastrophe — no destroyer has swept away the 
forms of life of one period, and replaced them by a totally new 
creation ; but one species has vanished and another has taken 
its place ; creatures of one type of structure have diminished, 
those of another have increased, as time passed on. And thus, 
while the differences between the living creatures of the time 
before the chalk and those of the present day appear startling, 
if placed side by side, we are led from one to the other by the 
most gradual progress, if we follow the course of Nature through 
the whole series of those relics of her operations which she has 
left behind. 

And it is by the population of the chalk sea that the ancient 
and the modern inhabitants of the world are most completely 
connected. The groups which are dying out flourish, side by 
side, with the groups which are now the dominant forms of 
life. 

Thus the chalk contains remains of those strange flying and 
swimming reptiles, the pterodactyl, the ichthyosaurus, and the 
plesiosaurus, which are found in no later deposits, but abounded 
in preceding ages. The chambered shells, called ammonites and 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 2$ I 

belemnites, which are so characteristic of the period preceding 
the cretaceous, in Uke manner die with it. 

But, amongst these fading remainders of a previous state of 
things, are some very modern forms of Hfe, looking Hke Yankee 
pedlars among a tribe of Red Indians. Crocodiles of modern 
type appear ; bony fishes, many of them very similar to existing 
species, almost supplant the forms of fish which predominate 
in more ancient seas ; and many kinds of living shell-fish first 
become known to us in the chalk. The vegetation acquires a 
modern aspect. A few living animals are not even distinguish- 
able as species, from those which existed at that remote epoch. 
The Globigeriiia of the present day, for example, is not differ- 
ent specifically from that of the chalk ; and the same may be 
said of many other Foramiiiifera. I think it probable that criti- 
cal and unprejudiced examination will show that more than one 
species of much higher animals have had a similar longevity ; 
but the only example which I can at present give confidently is 
the snake 's-head lamp-shell {Terebratulina caput serpentis), which 
lives in our English seas and abounded (as Terebratulina striata 
of authors) in the chalk. 

The longest line of human ancestry must hide its diminished 
head before the pedigree of this insignificant shell-fish. We 
Englishmen are proud to have an ancestor who was present at 
the Battle of Hastings. The ancestors of Terebratulina caput 
serpentis may have been present at a battle of Ichthyosauria in 
that part of the sea which, when the chalk was forming, flowed 
over the site of Hastings. While all around has changed, this 
Terebratulina has peacefully propagated its species from genera- 
tion to generation, and stands to this day, as a Hving testimony to 
the continuity of the present with the past history of the globe. 

Up to this moment I have stated, so far as I know, nothing 
but well-authenticated facts, and the immediate conclusions which 
they force upon the mind. 

But the mind is so constituted that it does not willingly rest 
in facts and immediate causes, but seeks always after a knowledge 
of the remoter links in the chain of causation. 

Taking the many changes of any given spot of the earth's 



252 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 

surface, from sea to land and from land to sea, as an established 
fact, we cannot refrain from asking ourselves how these changes 
have occurred. And when we have explained them — as they 
must be explained — by the alternate slow movements of eleva- 
tion and depression which have affected the crust of the earth, 
we go still further back, and ask, Why these movements ? 

I am not certain that any one can give you a satisfactory 
answer to that question. Assuredly I cannot. All that can be 
said, for certain, is, that such movements are part of the ordinary 
course of nature, inasmuch as they are going on at the present 
time. Direct proof may be given, that some parts of the land 
of the northern hemisphere are at this moment insensibly rising 
and others insensibly sinking ; and there is indirect, but per- 
fectly satisfactory, proof, that an enormous area now covered by 
the Pacific has deepened thousands of feet, since the present 
inhabitants of that sea came into existence. 

Thus there is not a shadow of reason for believing that the 
physical changes of the globe, in past times, have been affected 
by other than natural causes. 

Is there any more reason for believing that the concomitant 
modifications in the forms of the living inhabitants of the globe 
have been brought about in other ways ? 

Before attempting to answer this question, let us try to form a 
distinct mental picture of what has happened, in some special case. 

The crocodiles are animals which, as a group, have a very 
vast antiquity. They abounded ages before the chalk was 
deposited ; they throng the rivers, in warm climates, at the 
present day. There is a difference in the form of the joints 
of the back-bone, and in some minor particulars, between the 
crocodiles of the present epoch and those which lived before 
the chalk ; but, in the cretaceous epoch, as I have already men- 
tioned, 'the crocodiles had assumed the modern type of structure. 
Notwithstanding this, the crocodiles of the chalk are not iden- 
tically the same as those which lived in the times called " older 
tertiary," which succeeded the cretaceous epoch ; and the croco- 
diles of the older tertiaries are not identical with those of the 
newer tertiaries, nor are these identical with existing forms. I 
leave open the question whether particular species may have 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 253 

lived on from epoch to epoch. But each epoch has had its 
pecuhar crocodiles ; though all, since the chalk, have belonged 
to the modern type, and differ simply in their proportions, and 
in such structural particulars as are discernible only to trained 
eyes. 

How is the existence of this long succession of different 
species of crocodiles to be accounted for ? 

Only two suppositions seem to be open to us. — Either each 
species of crocodile has been specially created, or it has arisen 
out of some pre-existing form by the operation of natural 
causes. 

Choose your hypothesis ; I have chosen mine. I can find no 
warranty for believing in the distinct creation of a score of suc- 
cessive species of crocodiles in the course of countless ages of 
time. Science gives no countenance to such a wild fancy ; nor 
can even the perverse ingenuity of a commentator pretend to 
discover this sense, in the simple words in which the writer of 
Genesis records the proceedings of the fifth and sixth days 
of the Creation. 

On the other hand, I see no good reason for doubting the 
necessary alternative, that all these varied species have been 
evolved from pre-existing crocodilian forms, by the operation of 
causes as completely a part of the common order of nature, as 
those which have effected the changes of the inorganic world. 

Few will venture to affirm that the reasoning which applies 
to crocodiles loses its force among other animals, or among 
plants. If one series of species has come into existence by the 
operation of natural causes, it seems folly to deny that all may 
have arisen in the same way, 

A small beginning has led to a great ending. If I were to 
put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but 
obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like 
the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no 
false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a 
jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has 
become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of 
the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the 
evolution of the earth. And in the shifting " without haste, but 



254 GLACIER ICE 

without rest " of the land and sea, as in the endless variation 
of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing 
but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the 
substance of the universe. 



GLACIER ICE 

JOHN TYNDALL 
[From lecture vi in Heat considered as a Mode of Motion, 1863.] 

Snow, perfectly formed, is not an irregular aggregate of ice-par- 
ticles ; in a calm atmosphere, the aqueous atoms arrange them- 
selves so as to form the most exquisite figures. You have seen 
those six-petalled flowers which form themselves within a block 
of ice when a beam of heat is sent through it. The snow-crystals, 
formed in a calm atmosphere, are built upon the same type : the 
molecules arrange themselves to form hexagonal stars. From a 
central nucleus shoot spiculae, every two of which are separated 
by an angle of 60°. From these central ribs smaller spiculse 
shoot right and left with unerring fidehty to the angle 60°, and 
from these again other smaller ones diverge at the same angle. 
The six-leaved blossoms assume the most wonderful variety of 
form ; their tracery is of the finest frozen gauze ; and round about 
their corners other rosettes of smaller dimensions often cling. 
Beauty is superposed upon beauty, as if Nature, once committed 
to her task, took delight in showing, even within the narrowest 
limits, the wealth of her resources. 

These frozen blossoms constitute our mountain snows ; they 
load the Alpine heights, where their frail architecture is soon de- 
stroyed by the accidents of the weather. Every winter they fall, 
and every summer they disappear, but this rhythmic action does 
not perfectly compensate itself. Below a certain line warmth is 
predominant, and the quantity which falls every winter is entirely 
swept away ; above this line cold is predominant, the quantity 
which falls is in excess of the quantity melted, and an annual resi- 
due remains. In winter the snows reach to the plains ; in summer 
they retreat to the snow-line, — to that particular hne where the 
snow-fall of every year is exactly balanced by the consumption, 



JOHN TYNDALL 255 

and above which is the region of eternal snows. But if a residue 
remains annually above the snow-line, the mountains must be 
loaded with a burden which increases every year. Supposing at a 
particular point above the line referred to, a layer of three feet a 
year is added to the mass ; this deposit, accumulating even through 
the brief period of the Christian era, would produce an elevation 
of 5580 feet. And did such accumulations continue throughout 
geologic instead of historic ages, there is no knowing the height to 
which the snows would pile themselves. It is manifest no accu- 
mulation of this kind takes place ; the quantity of snow on the 
mountains is not augmenting in this way; for some reason or 
other the sun is not permitted to lift the ocean out of its basins 
and pile its waters permanently upon the hills. 

But how is this annually augmenting load taken off the shoulders 
of the mountains? The snows sometimes detach themselves and 
rush down the slopes in avalanches, melting to water in the warmer 
air below. But the violent rush of the avalanche is not their only 
motion ; they also creep by almost insensible degrees down the 
slopes. As layer, moreover, heaps itself upon layer, the deeper 
portions of the mass become squeezed and consolidated ; the air 
first entrapped in the meshes of the snow is squeezed out, and the 
compressed mass approximates more and more to the character of 
ice. You know how the granules of a snowball will adhere ; you 
know how hard you can make it if mischievously inclined : the 
snowball is incipient ice ; augment your pressure, and you actu- 
ally convert it into ice. But even after it has attained a compact- 
ness which would entitle it to be called ice, it is still capable of 
yielding more or less, as the snow yields, to pressure. When, 
therefore, a sufficient depth of the substance collects upon the 
earth's surface, the lower portions are squeezed out by the press- 
ure of the upper ones, and if the snow rests upon a slope, it will 
yield principally in the direction of the slope, and move downwards. 

This motion is incessantly going on along the slopes of every 
snow-laden mountain ; in the Himalayas, in the Andes, in the 
Alps ; but in addition to this motion, which depends upon the 
power of the substance itself to yield to pressure, there is also 
a sliding motion over the inclined bed. The consolidated snow 
moves bodily over the mountain slope, grinding off the asperities 



256 GLACIER ICE 

of the rocks, and polishing their hard surfaces. The under surface 
of the mighty polisher is also scarred and furrowed by the rocks 
over which it has passed ; but as the compacted snow descends, 
it enters a warmer region, is more copiously melted and some- 
times, before the base of its slope is reached, it is wholly cut off 
by fusion. Sometimes, however, large and deep valleys receive the 
gelid masses thus sent down; in these valleys it is further consoli- 
dated, and through them it moves, at a slow but measurable pace, 
imitating in all its motions those of a river. The ice is thus 
carried far beyond the limits of perpetual snow, until, at length, the 
consumption below equals the supply above, and at this point the 
glacier ceases. From the snow-line downwards in summer, we 
have ice ; above the snow-line, both summer and winter, we have, 
on the surface, snow. The portion below the snow-line is called 
a glacier, that above the snow-line is called the neve. The neve, 
then, is the feeder of the glacier. 

Several valleys thus filled may unite in a single valley, the tribu- 
tary glaciers welding themselves together to form a trunk glacier. 
Both the main valley and its tributaries are often sinuous, and the 
tributaries must change their direction to form the trunk. The 
width of the valley, also, often changes ; the glacier is forced 
through narrow gorges, widening after it has passed them ; the 
centre of the glacier moves more quickly than the sides, and the 
surface more quickly than the bottom. The point of swiftest 
motion follows the same law as that observed in the flow of rivers, 
changing from one side of the centre to the other, as the flexure 
of the valley changes. Most of the great glaciers in the Alps 
have, in summer, a central velocity of two feet a day. There are 
points on the Mer-de-Glace, opposite the Montenvert, which have 
a daily motion of thirty inches in summer, and in winter have been 
found to move at half this rate. 

The power of accommodating itself to the channel through which 
it moves has led eminent men to assume that ice is viscous ; and 
the phenomena at first sight seem to enforce this assumption. 
The glacier widens, bends, and narrows, and its centre moves 
more quickly than its sides; a viscous mass would undoubtedly 
do the same. But the most delicate experiments on the capacity 
of ice to yield to strain, to stretch out like treacle, honey or tar, 



JOHN TYNDALL 257 

have failed to detect this stretching power. Is there, then, any 
other physical quality to which the power of accommodation pos- 
sessed by glacier ice, may be referred ? 

Let us approach this subject gradually. We know that vapour 
is continually escaping from the free surface of a liquid ; that the 
particles at the surface attain their gaseous liberty sooner than the 
particles within the hquid ; it is natural to expect a similar state 
of things with regard to ice ; that when the temperature of a 
mass of ice is uniformly augmented, the first particles to attain 
liquid liberty are those at the surface ; for here they are entirely 
free, on one side, from the controlling action of the surrounding 
particles. Supposing, then, two pieces of ice raised throughout 
to 32°, and meldng at this temperature at their surfaces; what 
may be expected to take place if we place the liquefying surfaces 
close together? We thereby virtually transfer these surfaces to 
the centre of the ice, where the motion of each molecule is con- 
trolled all round by its neighbours. As might reasonably be ex- 
pected, the liberty of liquidity at each point where the surfaces 
touch each other, is arrested, and the two pieces freeze together 
at these points. Let us make the experiment : Here are two 
masses, which I have just cut asunder by a saw ; I place their 
flat surfaces together ; half a minute's contact will suffice ; they 
are now frozen together, and by taking hold of one of them I 
thus lift them both. 

This is the effect to which attention was first directed by Mr. 
Faraday in June 1850, and which is now known under the name 
of Regelaiion. On a hot summer's day, I have gone into a shop 
in the Strand where fragments of ice were exposed in a basin in 
the window ; and with the shopman's permission have laid hold 
of the topmost piece of ice, and by means of it have lifted the 
whole of the pieces bodily out of the dish. Though the ther- 
mometer at the time stood at 80°, the pieces of ice had frozen 
together at their points of junction. Even under hot water this 
effect takes place ; I have here a basin of water as hot as my hand 
can bear ; I plunge into it these two pieces of ice, and hold them 
together for a moment : they are now frozen together, notwith- 
standing the presence of the heated liquid. A pretty experiment 
of Mr. Faraday's is to place a number of small fragments of ice 
s 



258 GLACIER ICE 

in a dish of water deep enough to float them. When one piece 
touches the other, if only at a single point, regelation instantly 
sets in. Thus a train of pieces may be caused to touch each 
other, and, after they have once so touched, you may take the 
terminal piece of the train, and, by means of it, draw all the 
others after it. When we seek to bend two pieces thus united at 
their point of junction, the frozen points suddenly separate by 
fracture, but at the same moment other points come into contact, 
and regelation sets in between them. Thus a wheel of ice might 
be caused to roll on an icy surface, the contacts being incessantly 
ruptured, with a crackling noise, and others as quickly established 
by regelation. In virtue of this property of regelation, ice is able 
to reproduce many of the phenomena which are usually ascribed 
to viscous bodies. 

Here, for example, is a straight bar of ice : I can by passing it 
successively through a series of moulds, each more curved than 
the last, finally turn it out as a semi-ring. The straight bar in 
being squeezed into the curved mould breaks, but by continuing 
the pressure new surfaces come into contact, and the continuity 
of the mass is restored. I take a handful of those small ice frag- 
ments and squeeze them together, they freeze at their points of 
contact and now the mass is one aggregate. The making of a 
snowball, as remarked by Mr. Faraday, illustrates the same prin- 
ciple. In order that this freezing shall take place, the snow ought 
to be at 32° and moist. When below 32° and dry, on being 
squeezed it behaves like salt. The crossing of snow bridges in 
the upper regions of the Swiss glaciers is often rendered possible 
solely by the regelation of the snow granules. The climber treads 
the mass carefully, and causes its granules to regelate": he thus 
obtains an amount of rigidity which, without the act of regelation, 
would be quite unattainable. To those accustomed to such work, 
the crossing of snow bridges, spanning, as they often do, fissures 
100 feet and more in depth, must appear quite appalling. 

If I still further squeeze this mass of ice fragments, I bring them 
into still closer proximity. My hand, however, is incompetent to 
squeeze them very closely together. I place them in this boxwood 
mould, which is a shallow cylinder, and placing a flat piece of box- , 
wood overhead, I introduce both between the plates of a small 



JOHN TYNDALL 259 

hydraulic press, and squeeze the mass forcibly into the mould. I 
now relieve the pressure and turn the substance out before you : 
it is converted into a coherent cake of ice. I place it in this 
lenticular cavity and again squeeze it. It is crushed by the press- 
ure, of course, but new contacts establish themselves, and there 
you have the mass a lens of ice. I now transfer my lens to this 
hemispherical cavity, and bring down upon it a hemispherical pro- 
tuberance, which is not quite able to fill the cavity. I squeeze the 
mass ; the ice, which a moment ago was a lens, is now squeezed 
into the space between the two spherical surfaces : I remove the 
protuberance, and here I have the interior surface of a cup of 
glassy ice. By care I release it from the mould, and there it is, 
a hemispherical cup, which I can fill with cold sherry, without the 
escape of a drop. I scrape with a chisel a quantity of ice from this 
block, and placing the spongy mass within this spherical cavity, I 
squeeze it and add to it, till finally I can bring down another 
spherical cavity upon it, enclosing it as a sphere between both. 
As I work the press the mass becomes more and more compacted. 
I add more material, and again squeeze ; by every such act the 
mass is made harder, and there you have a snow-ball before you 
such as you never saw before. It is a sphere of hard translucent 
ice. Thus, you see, broken ice can be compacted together by 
pressure, and in virtue of the property of regelation, which cements 
its touching surfaces, the substance may be made to take any 
shape we please. Were the experiment worth the trouble, I feel 
satisfied that I could form a rope of ice from this block, and after- 
wards coil the rope into a knot. Nothing of course can be easier 
than to produce statuettes of the substance from suitable moulds. 
It is easy to understand how a su-bstance so endowed can be 
squeezed through the gorges of the Alps — can bend so as to 
accommodate itself to the flexures of the Alpine valleys, and can 
permit of a differential motion of its parts, without at the same 
time possessing a sensible trace of viscosity. The hypothesis of 
viscosity, first started by Rendo, and worked out with such ability 
by Prof. Forbes, accounts, certainly, for half the facts. Where 
pressure comes into play, the deportment of ice is apparently that 
of a viscous body ; where tension comes into play, the analogy 
with a viscous body ceases. 



260 LEARNED WORDS AND POPULAR WORDS 

LEARNED WORDS AND POPULAR 
WORDS 

JAMES BRADSTREET GREENOUGH AND GEORGE LYMAN 
KITTREDGE 

[Chapter 3 of Words and their Ways in English Speech, 1901.] 

In every cultivated language there are two great classes of words 
which, taken together, comprise the whole vocabulary. First, 
there are those words with which we become acquainted in ordi- 
nary conversation, — which we learn, that is to say, from the members 
of our own family and from our familiar associates, and which we 
should know and use even if we could not read or write. They 
concern the common things of life, and are the stock in trade of 
all who speak the language. Such words maybe called " popular," 
since they belong to the people at large and are not the exclusive 
possession of a limited class. 

On the other hand, our language includes a multitude of words 
which are comparatively seldom used in ordinary conversation. 
Their meanings are known to every educated person, but there is 
little occasion to employ them at home or in the market-place. 
Our first acquaintance with them comes not from our mother's 
lips or from the talk of our schoolmates, but from books that we 
read, lectures that we hear, or the more formal conversation of 
highly educated speakers, who are discussing some particular topic 
in a style appropriately elevated above the habitual level of every- 
day life. Such words are called " learned," and the distinction 
between them and " popular " words is of great importance to a 
right understanding of linguistic process. 

The difference between popular and learned words may be 
easily seen in a few examples. We may describe a girl as " lively " 
or as " vivacious." In the first case, we are using a native Eng- 
Hsh formation from the familiar noun life. In the latter, we are 
using a Latin derivative which has precisely the same meaning. 
Yet the atmosphere of the two words is quite different. No one 
ever got the adjective lively out of a book. It is a part of every- 
body's vocabulary. We cannot remember a time when we did 



GREENOUGH AND KITTREDGE 26 1 

not know it, and we feel sure that we learned it long before we 
were able to read. On the other hand, we must have passed 
several years of our lives before learning the word vivacious. We 
may even remember the first time that we saw it in print or heard 
it from some grown-up friend who was talking over our childish 
heads. Both lively and vivacious are good EngHsh words, but 
lively is " popular " and vivacious is " learned." 

From the same point of view we may contrast the following pairs 
of synonyms:^ the same, identical; speech, oration; fire, con- 
flagration; choose, select; brave, 7ialorous ; swallowing, degluti- 
tion; striking, percussioti ; building, edifice; shady, umbrageous; 
puckery, astringent; learned, erudite; secret, cryptic; destroy, 
annihilate ; stiff, rigid; flabby, flaccid; queer, eccetitric ; behead, 
decapitate; round, circular; thiti, e?naciated ; fat, corpulent; 
truthful, veracious; try, ejideavor ; bit, modicum; piece, frag- 
?ne?it; sharp, acute; crazy, inaniacal ; king, sovereign; book, 
volmne ; lying, mendacious ; beggar, mendicant ; teacher, i?istruc- 
tor ; play, drama; air, atmosphere ; paint, pigment. 

The terms "popular" and "learned," as apphed to words, are 
not absolute definitions. No two persons have the same stock of 
words, and the same word may be " popular " in one man's 
vocabulary and " learned " in another's.^ There are also different 
grades of "popularity"; indeed there is in reality a continuous 
gradation from infantile words like 7namma a.nd papa to such erudite 
derivatives as concatenation and cataclysm. Still, the division into 
" learned " and " popular " is convenient and sound. Disputes 
may arise as to the classification of any particular word, but there 
can be no difference of opinion about the general principle. We 
must be careful, however, to avoid misconception. When we call 
a word " popular," we do not mean that it is a favorite word, but 
simply that it belongs to the people as a whole, — that is, it is 
everybody's word, not the possession of a limited number. When 

1 Not all the words are exact synonyms, but that is of no importance in the 
present discussion. 

2 It is instructive to study one's own vocabulary from this point of view, — mak- 
ing a list of (i) those words which we feel sure we learned in childhood, (2) those 
which we have learned in later life, but not from books, (3) those which have 
entered our vocabulary from books. We shall also find it useful to consider the 
difference between our reading vocabulary and our speaking vocabulary. 



262 LEARNED WORDS AND POPULAR WORDS 

we call a word " learned," we do not mean that it is used by 
scholars alone, but simply that its presence in the English vocabu- 
lary is due to books and the cultivation of literature rather than 
to the actual needs of ordinary conversation. 

Here is one of the main differences between a cultivated 
and an uncultivated language. Both possess a large stock of 
" popular " words ; but the cultivated language is also rich in 
" learned " words, with which the ruder tongue has not provided 
itself, simply because it has never felt the need of them. 

In English it will usually be found that the so-called learned 
words are of foreign origin. Most of them are derived from 
French or Latin, and a considerable number from Greek. The 
reason is obvious. The development of English hterature has 
not been isolated, but has taken place in close connection with 
the earnest study of foreign literatures. Thus, in the fourteenth 
century, when our language was assuming substantially the shape 
which it now bears, the literary exponent of English Hfe and 
thought, Geoffrey Chaucer, the first of our great poets, was pro- 
foundly influenced by Latin literature as well as by that of France 
and Italy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Greek 
and Latin classics were vigorously studied by almost every English 
writer of any consequence, and the great authors of antiquity 
were regarded as models, not merely of general literary form, but 
of expression in all its details. These foreign influences have 
varied much in character and intensity. But it is safe to say that 
there has been no time since 1350 when English writers of the 
highest class have not looked to Latin, French, and Italian 
authors for guidance and inspiration. From 1600 to the present 
day the direct influence of Greek Hterature and philosophy has 
also been enormous, — affecting as it has the finest spirits in a 
peculiarly pervasive way, — and its indirect influence is quite 
beyond calculation. Greek civilization, we should remember, 
has acted upon us, not merely through Greek literature and art, 
but also through the medium of Latin, since the Romans borrowed 
their higher culture from Greece. 

Now certain facts in the history of bur language have made it 
peculiarly incHned to borrow from French and Latin. The Nor- 
man Conquest in the eleventh century made French the language 



GREENOUGH AND KITTREDGE 263 

of polite society in England ; and, long after the contact between 
Norman-French and English had ceased to be of direct signifi- 
cance in our linguistic development, the^ reading and speaking of 
French and the study of French literature formed an important 
part of the education of English-speaking men and women. 
When literary English was in process of formation in the four- 
teenth and fifteenth centuries, the authors whose works deter- 
mined the cultivated vocabulary were almost as familiar with 
French as with their mother tongue, and it was therefore natural 
that they should borrow a good many French words. But these 
same authors were also familiar with Latin, which, though called 
a dead language, has always been the professional dialect of eccle- 
siastics and a lingua franca for educated men. Thus the borrow- 
ing from French and from Latin went on side by side, and it is 
often impossible to say from which of the two languages a par- 
ticular EngUsh word is taken. The practice of naturalizing 
French and Latin words was, then, firmly established in the four- 
teenth century, and when, in the sixteenth century, there was a 
great revival of Greek studies in England, the close literary re- 
lations between Greece and Rome facilitated the adoption of 
a considerable number of words from the Greek. Linguistic 
processes are cumulative : one does not stop when another begins. 
Hence we find all of these influences active in increasing the 
modern vocabulary. In particular, the language of science has 
looked to Greece for its terms, as the language of abstract thought 
has drawn its nomenclature from Latin. 

It would, however, be a great mistake to suppose that all our 
" popular " terms are of native origin, and that all foreign deriva- 
tives are " learned." The younger and less cultivated members 
of a community are naturally inclined to imitate the speech of the 
older and more cultivated. Hence, as time has passed, a great num- 
ber of French and Latin words, and even some that are derived from 
the Greek, have made themselves quite at home in ordinary con- 
versation. Such words, whatever their origin, are as truly popular 
as if they had been a part of our language from the earhest period. 

Examples of such popular ^ words of foreign derivation are the 
following : — 

1 The exact grade of " popularity " differs in these examples. 



264 LEARNED WORDS AND POPULAR WORDS 

From French : army, arrest, bay, card, catch, city, chase, chim- 
ney, cotiveyance, deceive, entry, engine, forge, hour, letter, mantle, 
mason, merchant, manner, mountain, map, ?nove, navy, prince, pen, 
pencil, parlor, river, rage, soldier, second, table, veil, village. 

From Latin : accommodate, act, add, adopt, animal, anxioiis, 
applause, arbitrate, auction, agent, calculate, cancer, circus, 
collapse, collision, column, congress, connect, consequence, con- 
tract, contradict, correct, creation, cucinnber, curve, centen- 
nial, decoj-ate, delicate, dentist, describe, diary, diffident, different, 
digest, direct, discuss, divide, educate, elect, emigrant, equal, erect, 
expect, extra, fact, genius, genuine, graduate, gratis, horrid, imitate, 
item, joke, junction, junior, major, mag?iificent, medicitie, medium, 
miser, obstinate, omit, pagan, pastor, pauper, pedal, pendulum, per- 
mit, picture, plague, postpone, premium, prevent, prospect, protect, 
quiet, recess, recipe, reduce, regular, salute, secure, series, sitigle, 
species, specimen, splendid, strict, student, subscribe, subtract, suburb, 
suffocate, suggest, tedious, timid, urge, vaccinate, various, veiitilation, 
vest, veto, victor, vim, vote. 

From Greek : a?ithracite, apathy, arsenic, aster, athlete, atlas, 
attic, barometer, biography, calomel, catarrh, catholic, catastrophe, 
catechism, caustic, chemist, crisis, dialogue, diphtheria, elastic, ency- 
clopedia, hector, homeopathy, iodine, lexicon, microscope, mo?ioto- 
nous, myth, neuralgia, panic, panorama, photograph, skeleton, 
strychnine, tactics, telegraph, tonic, zoology. 

No language can borrow extensively from foreign sources with- 
out losing a good many words of its own. Hence, if we compare 
the oldest form of English (Anglo-Saxon) with our modern speech, 
we shall discover that many words that were common in Anglo- 
Saxon have gone quite out of use, being replaced by their foreign 
equivalents. The "learned" word has driven out the "popular" 
word, and has thereupon, in many cases, become " popular " itself. 
Thus instead of A.S. here we use the French word army; instead 
of thegn or theow, the French word servatit ; instead of scipher'e 
(a compound of the Anglo-Saxon word for ship and that for army), 
we use navy ; instead of micel, we say latge ; instead of sig'e, vic- 
tory ; instead of swith'e, very ; instead of Idf, we say remainder or 
remnant, — and so on. 

Curiously enough, it sometimes happens that when both the 



GREENOUGH AND KITTREDGE 265 

native and the foreign word still have a place in our language, the 
latter has become the more popular, — the former being relegated 
to the higher or poetical style. Thus it is more natural for us to 
say divide (from L. divido) than cleave (from A.S. cteofan) ; 
travel ihsin /are ;^ river than stream; castle than burg; resi- 
dence i^diW dwelling ; remain than abide; expect X\\zx\ ween; pupil 
or scholar than learner ; destruction than bale ; protect or defend 
than shield ; immediately than straightzvay ; encourage than hearten; 
prescJit than bestow ; firm than steadfast; direct than forthright ; 
impetuous than heady ; modest than shamefaced ; prince than athe- 
ling ; noise or tumult or disturbance than din ; people than folk ; 
prophet than soothsayer ; fate than weird ; lancer than spear- 
man ; I intend than / a7n minded ; excavate than delve ; resist 
than withstand ; beautiful than goodly ; gracious than kindly. The 
very fact that the native words belong to the older stock has 
made them poetical ; for the language of poetry is always more 
archaic than that of prose. 

Frequently we have kept both the native and the foreign word, 
but in different senses, thus increasing our vocabulary to good 
purpose. The foreign word may be more emphatic than the 
native : as in brilliant, bright ; scintillate, sparkle ; astonishment, 
wonder; a conflagration, a fire; devour, eat up; labor, work. 
Or the native word may be more emphatic than the foreign : as 
m stench, odor ; straightforward, direct ; dead, deceased ; murder, 
homicide. Often, however, there is a wide distinction in meaning. 
Thus ^m^^r differs irom propeller ; child irora i?tfant ; history irom. 
tale; book ixom volutne ; forehead ixoxn front ; length from longi- 
tude; moony from lunar; sunny from solar; nightly from noc- 
turnal; churl from villain ; wretch from miser ; poor man from 
pauper ; run across from occur ; run into from incur ; fight from 
debate. 

From time to time attempts have been made to oust foreign 
words from our vocabulary and to replace them by native words 
that have become either obsolete or less usual (that is to say, less 
popular). Whimsical theorists have even set up the principle 
that no word of foreign origin should be employed when a native 

1 Fare is still common as a noun and in figurative senses. 

2 But the irregular •p\\xxz\ folks is a common colloquialism. 



266 LEARNED WORDS AND POPULAR WORDS 

word of the same meaning exists. In English, however, all such 
efforts are predestined to failure. They result, not in a simpler 
and more natural style, but in something unfamiliar, fantastic, and 
affected. Foreign words that have long been in common use are 
just as much English as if they had been a part of our language 
from the beginning. There is no rational theory on which they 
should be shunned. It would be just as reasonable for an English- 
man whose ancestors had lived in the island ever since the time 
of King Alfred, to disown as his countrymen the descendants of a 
Frenchman or a German who settled there three hundred years 
ago. The test of the learned or the popular character of a word 
is not its etymology, but the facts relating to its habitual employ- 
ment by plain speakers. Nor is there any principle on which, of 
two expressions, that which is popular should be preferred to that 
which is learned or less familiar. The sole criterion of choice con- 
sists in the appropriateness of one's language to the subject or 
the occasion. It would be ridiculous to address a crowd of soldiers 
in the same language that one would employ in a council of war. 
It would be no less ridiculous to harangue an assembly of generals 
as if they were a regiment on the eve of battle. The reaction 
against the excessive Latinization of English is a wholesome ten- 
dency, but it becomes a mere " fad " when it is carried out in a 
doctrinaire manner. As Chaucer declares : — 

" Ek Plato seith, whoso that can him rede, 
' The wordes mot be cosin to the dede.' " 

Every educated person has at least two ways of speaking his 
mother tongue. The first is that which he employs in his family, 
among his familiar friends, and on ordinary occasions. The sec- 
ond is that which he uses in discoursing on more complicated 
subjects, and in addressing persons with whom he is less intimately 
acquainted. It is, in short, the language which he employs when 
he is " on his dignity," as he puts on evening dress when he is 
going to dine. The difference between these two forms of lan- 
guage consists, in great measure, in a difference of vocabulary. 
The basis of familiar words must be the same in both, but the 
vocabulary appropriate to the more formal occasion will include 
many terms which would be stilted or affected in ordinary talk. 



GREENOUGH AND KITTREDGE 267 

There is also considerable difference between familiar and digni- 
fied language in the manner of utterance. Contrast the rapid 
utterance of our everyday dialect, full of contractions and clipped 
forms, with the more distinct enunciation of the pulpit or the 
platform. Thus, in conversation, we habitually employ such con- 
tractions as /'//, don't, wofi't, ifs, we'd, he'd, and the like, which 
we should never use in public speaking, unless of set purpose, to 
give a markedly colloquial tinge to what we have to say. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

MATTHEW ARNOLD 
[Chapter i of Culture and Anarchy, 1869.] 

The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity ; some- 
times, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. 
The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering 
of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so 
intellectual as curiosity ; it is valued either out of sheer vanity 
and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinc- 
tion, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other 
people who have not got it. No serious man would call this 
culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To find the 
real ground for the very different estimate which serious people 
will set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in the 
terms of which may lie a real ambiguity ; and such a motive the 
word curiosity gives us. 

I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the 
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad 
sense. With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapprov- 
ing sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things 
of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curi- 
osity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of 
frivolous and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Revietv, 
some little time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French 
critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate it in my 
judgment was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this : that 



268 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

in our English way it left out of sight the double sense really 
involved in the word curiosity, thinking enough was said to stamp 
M. Sainte-Beuve with blame if it was said that he was impelled in 
his operations as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to per- 
ceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, and many other people with 
him, would consider that this was praiseworthy and not blame- 
worthy, or to point out why it ought really to be accounted worthy 
of blame and not of praise. For as there is a curiosity about 
intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease, so 
there is certainly a curiosity, — a desire after the things of the 
mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing 
them as they are, — which is, in an intelligent being, natural and 
laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are 
implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often 
attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite 
of the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we 
mean to blame when we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says : 
" The first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire 
to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intel- 
ligent being yet more intelligent." This is the true ground to 
assign for the genuine scientific passion, however manifested, 
and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this passion ; and 
it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term curiosity 
stand to describe it. 

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the 
scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, 
natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground 
of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, 
the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for 
removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminish- 
ing hun;ian misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better 
and happier than we found it, — motives eminently such as are 
called social, — come in as part of the grounds of culture, 
and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly 
described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its 
origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfectio7i. It 
moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific 
passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 269 

passion for doing good. As, in the first view of it, we took for 
its worthy motto Montesquieu's words : " To render an intelli- 
gent being yet more intelligent ! " so, in the second view of it, 
there is no better motto which it can have than these words 
of Bishop Wilson : " To make reason and the will of God 
prevail ! " 

Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be over- 
hasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, 
because its turn is for acting rather than thinking and it wants 
to be beginning to act ; and whereas it is apt to take its own 
conceptions, which proceed from its own state of development 
and share in all the imperfections and immaturities of this, for a 
basj^s of action ; what distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed 
hy the scientific passion as well as by the passion of doing 
good ; that it demands worthy notions of reason and the will of 
God, and does not readily suffer its own crude conceptions to 
substitute themselves for them. And knowing that no action or 
institution can be salutary and stable which is not based on 
reason and the will of God, it is not so bent on acting and insti- 
tuting, even with the great aim of diminishing human error and 
misery ever before its thoughts, but that it can remember that 
acting and instituting are of little use, unless we know how and 
what we ought to act and to institute. 

This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than 
that other, which is founded solely on the scientific passion for 
knowing. But it needs times of faith and ardour, times when 
the intellectual horizon is opening and widening all round us, 
to flourish in. And is not the close and bounded intellectual 
horizon in which we have long lived and moved now lifting up, 
and are not new lights finding free passage to shine in upon us ? 
For a long time there was no passage for them to make their 
way in upon us, and then it was of no use to think of adapting 
the world's action to them. Where was the hope of making 
reason and the will of God prevail among people who had a 
routine which they had christened reason and the will of God, 
in which they were inextricably bound, and beyond which they 
had no power of looking ? But now the iron force of adhesion 
to the old routine, — social, political, religious, — has wonder- 



270 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

fully yielded ; the iron force of exclusion of all which is new 
has wonderfully yielded. The danger now is, not that people 
should obstinately refuse to allow anything but their old routine 
to pass for reason and the will of God, but either that they 
should allow some novelty or other to pass for these too easily, 
or else that they should underrate the importance of them alto- 
gether, and think it enough to follow action for its own sake, 
without troubling themselves to make reason and the will of 
God prevail therein. Now, then, is the moment for culture to 
be of service, culture which believes in making reason and the 
will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pur- 
suit of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invinci- 
ble exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its 
ideas, simply because they are new. 

The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is 
regarded not solely as the endeavour to see things as they are, 
to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems 
to be intended and aimed at in the world, and which it is a 
man's happiness to go along with or his misery to go counter 
to, — to learn, in short, the will of God, — the moment, I say, 
culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and 
learn this, but as the endeavour, also, to make it prevail^ the 
moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes 
manifest. The mere endeavour to see and learn the truth for 
our own personal satisfaction is indeed a commencement for 
making it prevail, a preparing the way for this, which always 
serves this, and is wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame abso- 
lutely in itself and not only in its caricature and degeneration. 
But perhaps it has got stamped with blame, and disparaged 
with the dubious title of curiosity, because in comparison with 
this wider endeavour of such great and plain utility it looks self- 
ish, petty, and unprofitable. 

And religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts 
by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect 
itself, — religion, that voice of the deepest human experience, — 
does not only enjoin and sanction the aim which is the great 
aim of culture, the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what 
perfection is and to make it prevail ; but also, in determining 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 



271 



generally in what human perfection consists, religion comes to a 
conclusion identical with that which culture, — culture seeking 
the determination of this question through all the voices of hu- 
man experience which have been heard upon it, of art, science, 
poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion, in order to 
give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution, — likewise 
reaches. Religion says : The kingdom of God is withi^i you ; 
and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an 
i?iternal condition, in the growth and predominance of our hu- 
manity proper, as distinguished from our animality. It places 
it in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious 
expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling, which make the 
peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature. As I 
have said on a former occasion : " It is in making endless addi- 
tions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless 
growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race 
finds its ideal. To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable 
aid, and that is the true value of culture." Not a having and a 
resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of per- 
fection as culture conceives it ; and here, too, it coincides with 
religion. 

And because men are all members of one great whole, and 
the sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one mem- 
ber to be indifferent to the rest or to have a perfect welfare 
independent of the rest, the expansion of our humanity, to suit 
the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general 
expansion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible 
while the individual remains isolated. The individual is re- 
quired, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own 
development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in 
his march towards perfection, to be continually doing all he can 
to enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream sweep- 
ing thitherward. And here, once more, culture lays on us the 
same obligation as religion, which says, as Bishop Wilson has 
admirably put it, that " to promote the kingdom of God is to 
increase and hasten one's own happiness." 

But, finally, perfection, — as culture from a thorough dis- 
interested study of human nature and human experience learns 



2/2 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

to conseiveolv— is a harmonious expansion of all the powers 
which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not 
consistent with the over-development of any one power at the 
expense of the rest. Here cuhure goes beyond reUgion, as 
reHgion is generally conceived by us. 

If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious 
perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in 
becoming something rather than in having something, in an in- 
ward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of 
circumstances, — it is clear that culture, instead of being the 
frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic 
Harrison, and many other Liberals are apt to call it, has a very 
important function to fulfil for mankind. And this function 
is particularly important in our modern world, of which the 
whole civilisation is, to a much greater degree than the civili- 
sation of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and 
tends constantly to become more so. But above all in our own 
country has culture a weighty part to perform, because here 
that mechanical character, which civilisation tends to take 
everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree. Indeed 
nearly all the characters of perfection, as culture teaches us to 
fix them, meet in this country with some powerful tendency 
which thwarts them and sets them at defiance. The idea of 
perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at 
variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem 
with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with 
us. The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the hu- 
man family is at variance with our strong individualism, our 
hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual's 
personality, our maxim of " every man for himself." Above all, 
the idea of perfection as a harnwnious expansion of human 
nature is at variance with our want of flexibility, with our 
inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing, with our 
intense energetic absorption in the particular pursuit we happen 
to be following. So culture has a rough task to achieve in this 
country. Its preachers have, and are likely long to have, a 
hard time of it, and they will much oftener be regarded, for a 
great while to come, as elegant or spurious Jeremiahs than as 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 273 

friends and benefactors. That, however, will not prevent their 
doing in the end good service if they persevere. And, mean- 
while, the mode of action they have to pursue, and the sort of 
habits they must fight against, ought to be made quite clear for 
every one to see, who may be willing to look at the matter atten- 
tively and dispassionately. 

Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in 
machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this 
machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve ; but always 
in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. What is 
freedom but machinery ? what is population but machinery ? 
what is coal but machinery ? what are railroads but machinery ? 
what is wealth but machinery? what are, even, religious organi- 
sations but machinery ? Now almost every voice in England is 
accustomed to speak of these things as if they were precious 
ends in themselves, and therefore had some of the characters 
of perfection indisputably joined to them. I have before now 
noticed Mr. Roebuck's stock argument for proving the greatness 
and happiness of England as she is, and for quite stopping the 
mouths of all gainsayers. Mr. Roebuck is never weary of reit- 
erating this argument of his, so I do not know why I should be 
w^eary of noticing it. " May not every man in England say what 
he likes ? " — Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks ; and that, he thinks, 
is quite sufficient, and when every man may say what he likes, 
our aspirations ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations of cul- 
ture, which is the study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless 
what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying, 
— has good in it, and more good than bad. In the same way the 
Times, replying to some foreign strictures on the dress, looks, 
and behaviour of the English abroad, urges that the English 
ideal is that every one should be free to do and to look just as 
he likes. But culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each 
raw person may like the rule by which he fashions himself ; but 
to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, 
graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that. 

And in the same way with respect to railroads and coal. Every 
one must have observed the strange language current during the 
late discussions as to the possible failures of our supplies of coal. 

T 



2/4 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of 
our national greatness ; if our coal runs short, there is an end 
of the greatness of England. But what is greatness ? — culture 
makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to 
excite love, interest, and admiration ; and the outward proof of 
possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admira- 
tion. If England were swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which 
of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, 
interest, and admiration of mankind, — would most, therefore, 
show the evidences of having possessed greatness, — the England 
of the last twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of a time 
of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our industrial 
operations depending on coal, were very little developed ? Well, 
then, what an unsound habit of mind it must be which makes us 
talk of things like coal or iron as constituting the greatness of 
England, and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on seeing 
things as they are, and thus dissipating delusions of this kind 
and fixing standards of perfection that are real ! 

Wealth, again, that end to which our prodigious works for 
material advantage are directed, — the commonest of common- 
places tells us how men are always apt to regard wealth as a 
precious end in itself ; and certainly they have never been so 
apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time. 
Never did people believe anything more firmly than nine Eng- 
lishmen out of ten at the present day believe that our greatness 
and welfare are proved by our being so very rich. Now, the use 
of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of 
perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to 
say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, 
but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it M'ere not for 
this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole 
world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong 
to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our great- 
ness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who 
most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the 
very people whom we call Philistines. Culture says : " Consider 
these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, 
the very tones of their voice ; look at them attentively ; observe 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 



275 



the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the 
words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which 
make the furniture of their minds ; would any amount of wealth 
be worth having with the condition that one was to become just 
like these people by having it ? " And thus culture begets a dis- 
satisfaction which is of the highest possible value in stemming 
the common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and industrial 
community, and which saves the future, as one may hope, from 
being vulgarised, even if it cannot save the present. 

Population, again, and bodily health and vigour, are things 
which are nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading, 
exaggerated way as in England. Both are really machinery ; 
yet how many people all around us do we see rest in them and 
fail to look beyond them ! Why, one has heard people, fresh 
from reading certain articles of the Times on the Registrar-Gen- 
eral's returns of marriages and births in this country, who would 
talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if 
they had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and meritorious 
in them ; as if the British Philistine would have only to present 
himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order 
to be received among the sheep as a matter of right ! 

But bodily health and vigour, it may be said, are not to be 
classed with wealth and population as mere machinery ; they 
have a more real and essential value. True ; but only as they 
are more intimately connected with a perfect spiritual condition 
than wealth or population are. The moment we disjoin them from 
the idea of a perfect spiritual condition, and pursue them, as we 
do pursue them, for their own sake and as ends in themselves, our 
worship of them becomes as mere worship of machinery, as our 
worship of wealth or population, and as unintelligent and vulgar- 
ising a worship as that is. Every one with anything like an 
adequate idea of human perfection has distinctly marked this 
subordination to higher and spiritual ends of the cultivation of 
bodily vigour and activity. " Bodily exercise profiteth little ; but 
godliness is profitable unto all things," says the author of the 
Epistle to Timothy. And the utilitarian Franklin says just as 
explicitly : — " Eat and drink such an exact quantity as suits the 
constitution of thy body, in refet-ence to the services of the ??iifid.^'' 



2/6 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human per- 
fection simply and broadly in view, and not assigning to this per- 
fection, as religion or utilitarianism assigns to it, a special and 
limited character, this point of view, I say, of culture is best given 
by these words of Epictetus : — " It is a sign of de^ma," says he, 
— that is, of a nature not finely tempered, — " to give yourselves 
up to things which relate to the body ; to make, for instance, a 
great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a great fuss 
about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss about 
riding. All these things ought to be done merely by the way : 
the formation of the spirit and character must be our real con- 
cern." This is admirable ; and, indeed, the Greek word cixfyv'ca, 
a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection 
as culture brings us to conceive it : a harmonious perfection, a 
perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are 
both present, which unites " the two noblest of things," — as 
Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too lit- 
tle, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, — " the 
two noblest of things, sweetness and light. '''' The ev<})vri<; is the 
man who tends towards sweetness and light ; the d^u?/?, on 
the other hand, is our Philistine. The immense spiritual sig- 
nificance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with 
this central and happy idea of the essential character of human 
perfection ; and Mr. Bright's misconception of culture, as a 
smattering of Greek and Latin, comes itself, after all, from this 
wonderful significance of the Greeks having afi^ected the very 
machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage 
to it. 

In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of per- 
fection, culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with 
poetry. Far more than on our freedom, our population, and our 
industrialism, many amongst us rely upon our religious organisa- 
tions to save us. I have called religion a yet more important 
manifestation of human nature than poetry, because it has worked 
on a broader scale for perfection, and with greater masses of 
men. But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on 
all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and 
invaluable idea, though it has not yet had the success that the 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 2/7 

idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a 
human nature perfect on the moral side, — which is the domi- 
nant idea of religion, — has been enabled to have; and it is 
destined, adding to itself the religious idea of a devout energy, 
to transform and govern the other. 

The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion and 
poetry are one, in which the idea of beauty and of a human na- 
ture perfect on all sides adds to itself a religious and devout 
energy, and works in the strength of that, is on this account of 
such surpassing interest and instructiveness for us, though it 
was, — as, having regard to the human race in general, and, 
indeed, having regard to the Greeks themselves, we must own, 
— a premature attempt, an attempt which for success needed 
the moral and religious libre in humanity to be more braced and 
developed than it had yet been. But Greece did not err in hav- 
ing the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, 
so present and paramount. It is impossible to have this idea 
too present and paramount ; only, the moral fibre must be braced 
too. And we, because we have braced the moral fibre, are not 
on that account in the right way, if at the same time the idea of 
beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, is wanting or 
misapprehended amongst us ; and evidently it is wanting or mis- 
apprehended at present. And when we rely as we do on our 
religious organisations, which in themselves do not and cannot 
give us this idea, and think we have done enough if we make 
them spread and prevail, then, I say, we fall into our common 
fault of overvaluing machinery. ^ 

Nothing is more common than for people to confound the in- 
ward peace and satisfaction which follows the subduing of the 
obvious faults of our animality with what I may call absolute ^ 
inward peace and satisfaction, — the peace and satisfaction 
which are reached as we draw near to complete spiritual perfec- 
tion, and not merely to moral perfection, or rather to relative 
moral perfection. No people in the world have done more and 
struggled more to attain this relative moral perfection than our 
English race has. For no people in the world has the command 
to resist the devil, to overcome the wicked one, in the nearest and 
most obvious sense of those words, had such a pressing force 



2/8 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

and reality. And we have had our reward, not only in the great 
worldly prosperity which our obedience to this command has 
brought us, but also, and far more, in great inward peace and 
satisfaction. But to me few things are more pathetic than to see 
people, on the strength of the inward peace and satisfaction 
which their rudimentary efforts towards perfection have brought 
them, employ, concerning their incomplete perfection and the 
religious organisations within which they have found it, language 
which properly applies only to complete perfection, and is a far- 
off echo of the human soul's prophecy of it. Religion itself, I 
need hardly say, supplies them in abundance with this grand 
language. And very freely do they use it ; yet it is really the 
severest possible criticism of such an incomplete perfection as 
alone we have yet reached through our religious organisations. 

The impulse of the English race towards moral development 
and self-conquest has nowhere so powerfully manifested itself as 
in Puritanism. Nowhere has Puritanism found so adequate an 
expression as in the religious organisation of the Independents. 
The modern Independents have a newspaper, the Nonconfonnist, 
written with great sincerity and ability. The motto, the stand- 
ard, the profession of faith which this organ of theirs carries 
aloft, is : " The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of 
the Protestant religion." There is sweetness and light, and an 
ideal of complete harmonious human perfection ! One need not 
go to culture and poetry to find language to judge it. Religion, 
with its instinct for perfection, supplies language to judge it, 
language, too, which is in our mouths every day. " Finally, be 
of one mind, united in feeling," says St. Peter. There is an 
ideal which judges the Puritan ideal : " The Dissidence of Dis- 
sent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion ! " And 
religious organisations like this are what people believe in, rest 
in, would give their lives for ! Such, I say, is the wonderful 
virtue of even the beginnings of perfection, of having conquered 
even the plain faults of our animality, that the religious organisa- 
tion which has helped us to do it can seem to us something 
precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it wears 
such a brand of imperfection on its forehead as this. And men 
have got such a habit of giving to the language of religion a 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 2/9 

special application, of making it a mere jargon, that for the con- 
demnation which religion itself passes on the shortcomings of 
their religious organisations they have no ear ; they are sure to 
cheat themselves and to explain this condemnation away. They 
can only be reached by the criticism which culture, like poetry, 
speaking a language not to be sophisticated, and resolutely test- 
ing these organisations by the ideal of a human perfection com- 
plete on all sides, applies to them. 

But men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are again and 
again failing, and failing conspicuously, in the necessary first 
stage to a harmonious perfection, in the subduing of the great 
obvious faults of our animality, which it is the glory of these 
religious organisations to have helped us to svibdue. True, they 
do often so fail. They have often been without the virtues as 
well as the faults of the Puritan ; it has been one of their dan- 
gers that they so felt the Puritan's faults that they too much 
neglected the practice of his virtues. I will not, however, excul- 
pate them at the Puritan's expense. They have often failed in 
morality, and morality is indispensable. And they have been 
punished for their failure, as the Puritan has been rewarded for 
his performance. They have been punished wherein they erred ; 
but their ideal of beauty, of sweetness and light, and a human 
nature complete on all its sides, remains the true ideal of perfec- 
tion still ; just as the Puritan's ideal of perfection remains nar- 
row and inadequate, although for what he did well he has been 
richly rewarded. Notwithstanding the mighty results of the 
Pilgrim Fathers' voyage, they and their standard of perfection 
are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakspeare or 
Virgil, — souls in whom sweetness and light, and all that in 
human nature is most humane, were eminent, — accompanying 
them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company 
Shakspeare and Virgil would have found them ! In the same 
way let us jvidge the religious organisations which we see all 
around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness 
which they have accomplished ; but do not let us fail to see 
clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow and inade- 
quate, and that the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism 
of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its true 



28o SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

goal. As I said with regard to wealth : Let us look at the life of 
those who live in and for it, — so I say with regard to the reli- 
gious organisations. Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper 
as the Nonconformist^ — a life of jealousy of the Establishment, dis- 
putes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons ; and then think 
of it as an ideal of a human life completing itself on all sides, and 
aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and perfection ! 
Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconfontiist, one 
of the religious organisations of this country, was a short time 
ago giving an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, 
and of all the vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that 
crowd ; and then the writer turned suddenly round upon Pro- 
fessor Huxley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this 
vice and hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed 
to ask the asker this question : and how do you propose to cure 
it with such a religion as yours ? How is the ideal of a life so 
unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far re- 
moved from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as 
is the life of your religious organisation as you yourself reflect 
it, to conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness ? In- 
deed, the strongest plea for the study of perfection as pursued 
by culture, the clearest proof of the actual inadequacy of the 
idea of perfection held by the religious organisations, — express- 
ing, as I have said, the most widespread effort which the human 
race has yet made after perfection, — is to be found in the state 
of our life and society with these in possession of it, and having 
been in possession of it I know not how many hundred years. 
We are all of us included in some religious organisation or other ; 
we all call ourselves, in the sublime and aspiring language of 
religion which I have before noticed, children of God. Children 
of God; — it is an immense pretension! — and how are we to 
justify it ? By the works which we do, and the words which we 
speak. And the work which we collective children of God do, 
our grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us to 
dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable external 
hideousness, and with its internal canker of publice egestas, pri- 
vatim opulentia^ — to use the words which Sallust puts into 

1 [Public poverty, private opulence.] 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 28 1 

Cato's mouth about Rome, — unequalled in the world! The 
word again, which we children of God speak, the voice which most 
hits our collective thought, the newspaper with the largest circu- 
lation in England, nay, with the largest circulation in the whole 
world, is the Daily Telegraph ! I say that when our religious 
organisations, — which I admit to express the most considerable 
effort after perfection that our race has yet made, — land us in 
no better result than this, it is high time to examine carefully 
their idea of perfection, to see whether it does not leave out of 
account sides and forces of human nature which we might turn 
to great use ; whether it would not be more operative if it were 
more complete. And I say that the English reliance on our 
religious organisations and on their ideas of human perfection 
just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular 
Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth, — mere belief in 
machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely counteracted 
by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the 
human race onwards to a more complete, a harmonious perfection. 
Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, 
its desire simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its 
freedom from fanaticism, by its attitude towards all this ma- 
chinery, even while it insists that it is machinery. Fanatics, 
seeing the mischief men do themselves by their blind belief in 
some machinery or other, — whether it is wealth and industrial- 
ism, or whether it is the cultivation of bodily strength and activ- 
ity, or whether it is a political organisation, — or whether it is a 
religious organisation, — oppose with might and main the ten- 
dency to this or that political and religious organisation, or to 
games and athletic exercises, or to wealth and industrialism, and 
try violently to stop it. But the flexibility which sweetness and 
light give, and which is one of the rewards of culture pursued in 
good faith, enables a man to see that a tendency may be neces- 
sary, and even, as a preparation for something in the future, 
salutary, and yet that the generations or individuals who obey 
this tendency are sacrificed to it, that they fall short of the hope 
of perfection by following it ; and that its mischiefs are to be 
criticised, lest it should take too firm a hold and last after it has 
served its purpose. 



282 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech at Paris, — and 
others have pointed out the same thing, — how necessary is the 
present great movement towards wealth and industrialism, in 
order to lay broad foundations of. material well-being for the 
society of the future. The worst of these Justifications is, that 
they are generally addressed to the very people engaged, body 
and soul, in the movement in question ; at all events, that they 
are always seized with the greatest avidity by these people, and 
taken by them as quite justifying their life ; and that thus they 
tend to harden them in their sins. Now, culture admits the 
necessity of the movement towards fortune-making and exag- 
gerated industriaHsm, readily allows that the future may derive 
benefit from it ; but insists, at the same time, that the passing 
generations of industrialists, — forming, for the most part, the 
stout main body of Philistinism, — are sacrificed to it. In the 
same way, the result of all the games and sports which occupy 
the passing generation of boys and young men may be the estab- 
lishment of a better and sounder physical type for the future to 
work with. Culture does not set itself against the games and 
sports ; it congratulates the future, and hopes it will make a 
good use of its improved physical basis ; but it points out that 
our passing generation of boys and young men is, meantime, 
sacrificed. Puritanism was perhaps necessary to develop the 
moral fibre of the English race. Nonconformity to break the 
yoke of ecclesiastical domination over men's minds and to pre- 
pare the way for freedom of thought in the distant future ; still, 
culture points out that the harmonious perfection of generations 
of Puritans and Nonconformists have been, in consequence, sac- 
rificed. Freedom of speech may be necessary for the society of 
the future, but the young lions of the Daily Telegraph in the 
meanwhile are sacrificed. A voice for every man in his coun- 
try's government may be necessary for the society of the future, 
but meanwhile Mr. Beales and Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed. 

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults ; and she has 
heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon 
the modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the 
beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to 
seize one truth, — the truth that beauty and sweetness are essen- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 283 

tial characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist 
on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say 
boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our 
sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bot- 
tom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposi- 
tion to so many triumphant movements. And the sentiment is 
true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its 
power even in its defeat. We have not won our political battles, 
we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our 
adversaries' advance, we have not marched victoriously with the 
modern world ; but we have told silently upon the mind of the 
country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our 
adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up 
our own communications with the future. Look at the course 
of the great movement which shook Oxford to its centre some 
thirty years ago ! It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. 
Newman's Apology may see, against what in one word may be 
called " Liberalism." Liberalism prevailed ; it was the ap- 
pointed force to do the work of the hour ; it was necessary, it 
was inevitable that it should prevail. The Oxford movement 
was broken, it failed ; our wrecks are scattered on every 
shore : — 

Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ? ^ 

But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, and as 
it really broke the Oxford movement ? It was the great middle- 
class liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief 
the Reform Bill of 1832, and local self-government, in politics; 
in the social sphere, free-trade, unrestricted competition, and 
the making of large industrial fortunes ; in the religious sphere, 
the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant 
religion. I do not say that other and more intelligent forces 
than this were not opposed to the Oxford movement : but this 
was the force which really beat it ; this was the force which 
Dr. Newman felt himself fighting with ; this was the force which 
till only the other day seemed to be the paramount force in this 
country, and to be in possession of the future ; this was the force 

1 [What region in the earth not full of our labor ?] 



284 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

whose achievements fill Mr. Lowe with such inexpressible admi- 
ration, and whose rule he was so horror-struck to see threatened. 
And where is this great force of Philistinism now ? It is thrust 
into the second rank, it is become a power of yesterday, it has 
lost the future. A new power has suddenly appeared, a power 
which it is impossible yet to judge fully, but which is certainly 
a wholly different force from middle-class liberalism ; different 
in its cardinal points of belief, different in its tendencies in every 
sphere. It loves and admires neither the legislation of middle- 
class Parliaments, nor the local self-government of middle-class 
vestries, nor the unrestricted competition of middle-class indus- 
trialists, nor the dissidence of middle-class Dissent and the 
Protestantism of middle-class Protestant religion. I am not 
now praising this new force, or saying that its own ideals are 
better ; all I say is, that they are wholly different. And who 
will estimate how much the currents of feeling created by Dr. 
Newman's movements, the keen desire for beauty and sweetness 
which it nourished, the deep aversion it manifested to the hard- 
ness and vulgarity of middle-class liberalism, the strong light it 
turned on the hideous and grotesque illusions of middle-class 
Protestantism, — who will estimate how much all these contrib- 
uted to swell the tide of secret dissatisfaction which has mined 
the ground under self-confident liberalism of the last thirty years, 
and has prepared the way for its sudden collapse and superses- 
sion? It is in this manner that the sentiment of Oxford for 
beauty and sweetness conquers, and in this manner long may it 
continue to conquer ! 

In this manner it w^orks to the same end as culture, and there 
is plenty of work for it yet to do. I have said that the new and 
more democratic force which is now superseding our old middle- 
class liberalism cannot yet be rightly judged. It has its main 
tendencies still to form. We hear promises of its giving us 
administrative reform, law reform, reform of education, and I 
know not what ; but those promises come rather from its advo- 
cates, wishing to make a good plea for it and to justify it for 
superseding middle-class liberalism, than from clear tendencies 
which it has itself yet developed. But meanwhile it has plenty 
of well-intentioned friends against whom culture may with ad- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 285 

vantage continue to uphold steadily its ideal of human perfec- 
tion ; that this is an inward spiritual activity, having for its char- 
acters Increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, Increased 
sympathy. Mr. Bright, who has a foot in both worlds, the world 
of middle-class liberalism and the world of democracy, but who 
brings most of his ideas from the world of middle-class liberalism 
in which he was bred, always inclines to inculcate that faith in 
machinery to which, as we have seen. Englishmen are so prone, 
and which has been the bane of middle-class liberalism. He 
complains with a sorrowful indignation of people who " appear 
to have no proper estimate of the value of the franchise ; " he 
leads his disciples to believe, — what the Englishman is always 
too ready to believe, — that the having a vote, like the having a 
large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in itself 
some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature. Or 
else he cries out to the democracy, — "the men," as he calls 
them, "upon whose shoulders the greatness of England rests," 
— he cries out to them: "See what you have done! I look 
over this country and see the cities you have built, the railroads 
you have made, the manufactures you have produced, the cargoes 
which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the world 
has ever seen ! I see that you have converted by your labours 
what was once a wilderness, these islands, into a fruitful gar- 
den ; I know that you have created this wealth, and are a nation 
whose name is a word of power throughout all the world." Why, 
this is just the very style of laudation with which Mr. Roebuck 
or Mr. Lowe debauches the minds of the middle classes, and 
makes such Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teach- 
ing a man to value himself not on what he Is, not on his prog- 
ress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the railroads 
he has constructed, or the bigness of the tabernacle he has built. 
Only the middle classes are told that they have done it all with 
their energy, self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy are 
told they have done it all with their hands and sinews. But 
teaching the democracy to put its trust in achievements of this 
kind is merely training them to be Philistines to take the place 
of the Philistines whom they are superseding ; and they too, 
like the middle class, will be encouraged to sit down at the ban- 



286 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

quet of the future without having on a wedding garment, and 
nothing excellent can then come from them. Those who know 
their besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened 
to them, or those who will read the instructive account recently 
given of them by one of themselves, the Journeyman Engineer, 
will agree that the idea which culture sets before us of perfec- 
tion, — an increased spiritual activity, having for its characters 
increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased 
sympathy, — is an idea which the new democracy needs far 
more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the 
wonderfulness of its own industrial performances. 

Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for leading 
it, not in the old ruts of middle-class Philistinism, but in ways 
which are naturally alluring to the feet of democracy, though in 
this country they are novel and untried ways. I may call them 
the ways of Jacobinism. Violent indignation with the past, ab- 
stract systems of renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine 
drawn up in black and white for elaborating down to the very 
smallest details a rational society for the future, — these are the 
ways of Jacobinism. Mr. Frederic Harrison and other disciples 
of Comte, — one of them, Mr. Congreve, is an old friend of 
mine, and I am glad to have an opportunity of publicly express- 
ing my respect for his talents and character, — are among the 
friends of democracy who are for leading it in paths of this kind. 
Mr. Frederic Harrison is very hostile to culture,, and from a 
natural enough motive ; for culture is the eternal opponent of 
the two things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism,' — its 
fierceness, and its addiction to an abstract system. Culture is 
always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share 
in the bent of human destiny than their friends like. A current 
in people's minds sets towards new ideas ; people are dissatisfied 
with th'eir old narrow stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon 
ideas, or any other; and some man, some Bentham or Comte, 
who has the real merit of having early and strongly felt and 
helped the new current, but who brings plenty of narrowness 
and mistakes of his own into his feeling and help of it, is cred- 
ited with being the author of the whole current, the fit person to 
be entrusted with its regulation and to guide the human race. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 287 

The excellent German historian of the mythology of Rome, 
Preller, relating the introduction at Rome under the Tarquins 
of the worship of Apollo, the god of light, healing, and recon- 
ciliation, will have us observe that it was not so much the Tar- 
quins who brought to Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a 
current in the mind of the Roman people which set powerfully 
at that time towards a new worship of this kind, and away from 
the old run of Latin and Sabine religious ideas. In a similar 
way, culture directs our attention to the natural current there is 
in human affairs, and to its continual working, and will not let 
us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes us 
see not only his good side, but also how much in him was of 
necessity limited and transient ; nay, it even feels a pleasure, a 
sense of an increased freedom and of an ampler future, in so 
doing. 

I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to which 
I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the 
very incarnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the most con- 
siderable, it seems to me, whom America has yet produced, — 
Benjamin Franklin, — I remember the relief with which, after 
long feeling the sway of Franklin's imperturbable common-sense, 
I came upon a project of his for a new version of the Book of 
Job, to replace the old version, the style of which, says Franklin, 
has become obsolete, and thence less agreeable. " I give," he 
continues, " a few verses, which may serve as a sample of the 
kind of version I would recommend." We all recollect the famous 
verse in our translation : " Then Satan answered the Lord and 
said : ' Doth Job fear God for nought ? ' " Franklin makes this : 
" Does your Majesty imagine that Job's good conduct is the 
effect of mere personal attachment and affection?" I well re- 
member how, when first I read that, I drew a deep breath of 
relief, and said to myself : " After all, there is a stretch of humanity 
beyond Franklin's victorious good sense ! " So, after hearing 
Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator of modern society, 
and Bentham's mind and ideas proposed as the rulers of our 
future, I open the Deontology. There I read : " While Xenophon 
was writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates 
and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of .talking wis- 



288 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

dom and morality. This morality of theirs consisted in words ; 
this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every 
man's experience." From the moment of reading that, I am 
delivered from the bondage of Bentham ! the fanaticism of his 
adherents can touch me no longer. I feel the inadequacy of 
his mind and ideas for supplying the rule of human society, for 
perfection. 

Culture tends always thus to deal with the men of a system, 
of disciples, of a school ; with men like Comte, or the late Mr. 
Buckle, or Mr. Mill. However much it may find to admire 
in these personages, or in some of them, it nevertheless remem- 
bers the text : " Be not ye called Rabbi ! " and it soon passes on 
from any Rabbi. But Jacobinism loves a Rabbi ; it does not 
want to pass on from its Rabbi in pursuit of a future and still 
unreached perfection ; it wants its Rabbi and his ideas to 
stand for perfection, that they may with the more authority 
recast the world ; and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture, — 
eternally passing onwards and seeking, — is an impertinence 
and an offence. But culture, just because it resists this tendency 
of Jacobinism to impose on us a man with limitations and errors 
of his own along with the true ideas of which he is the organ, 
really does the world and Jacobinism itself a service. 

So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of 
those whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away 
with the inexhaustible indulgence proper to culture, the consid- 
eration of circumstances, the severe judgment of actions joined 
to the merciful judgment of persons. " The man of culture is 
in politics," cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, " one of the poorest 
mortals alive ! " Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing 
business, and he complains that the man of culture stops him 
with a " turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and in- 
decision in action." Of what use is culture, he asks, except for 
" a critic of new books or a professor of belles-lettres ? " Why, 
it is of use because, in presence of the fierce exasperation which 
breathes, or rather, I may say, hisses through the whole pro- 
duction in which Mr. Frederic Harrison asks that question, it 
reminds us that the perfection of human nature is sweetness 
and light. It is of use because, like religion, — that other effort 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 289 

after perfection, — it testifies that, where bitter envying and 
strife are, there is confusion and every evil work. 

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness 
and Hght. He who works for sweetness and light, works to 
make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for 
machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. 
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred ; culture 
has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It 
has one even yet greater ! — the passion for making them prevail. 
It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man ; it knows 
that the sweetness and Hght of the few must be imperfect until 
the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with 
sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we 
must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk 
from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweet- 
ness and light for as many as possible. Again and again I have 
insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how 
those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those 
are the flowering times for literature and art and all the crea- 
tive power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and 
thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure 
permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. 
Only it must be real thought and real beauty ; real sweetness 
and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as 
they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the 
way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses. 
The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of 
working on the masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate 
the masses with the set of ideas and judgments constituting the 
creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and politi- 
cal organisations give an example of this way of working on the 
masses. I condemn neither way ; but culture works differently. 
It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes ; it 
does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with 
ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away 
with classes ; to make the best that has been thought and known 
in the world current everywhere ; to make all men live in an 
atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas. 



290 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

as it uses them itself, freely, — nourished, and not bound by 
them. 

This is the social idea ; and the men of culture are the true 
apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who 
have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying 
from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the 
best ideas of their time ; who have laboured to divest knowledge 
of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, 
exclusive ; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique 
of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowl- 
edge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of 
sweetness and light. Such a man was Abelard in the Middle 
Ages, in spite of all his imperfections ; and thence the boundless 
emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were 
Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end of the last century ; 
and their services to Germany were in this way inestimably 
precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments will 
accumulate, and works far more perfect than the works of Les- 
sing and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet the 
names of these two men will fill a German with a reverence 
and enthusiasm such as the names of the most gifted masters 
will hardly awaken. And why ? Because they htimanised knowl- 
edge ; because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence ; 
because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, 
to make reason and the will of God prevail. With Saint Augus- 
tine they said : " Let us not leave thee alone to make in the 
secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of 
the firmament, the division of light from darkness ; let the chil- 
dren of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light 
shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and 
announce the revolution of the times ; for the old order is 
passed, and the new arises ; the night is spent, the day is come 
forth ; and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when 
thou shalt send forth labourers into thy harvest sown by other 
hands than theirs ; when thou shalt send forth new labourers to 
new seed-times, whereof the harvest shall be not yet." 



WALTER BAGEHOT 29 1 

ORNATE ART 

WALTER BAGEHOT 

[From Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning ; or Pure, Ornate, and 
Grotesque Art in English Poetry, 1864.] 

The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called 
ornate art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation 
of the typical idea in its perfection and its fulness, but it aims at 
so doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the 
type with the greatest number of circumstances which it will bear. 
It works not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and 
aggregation. The idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with 
the least clothing which it will endure, but with the richest and 
most involved clothing that it will admit. 

We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an 
illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just 
given one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects 
and the merits of this style. The story of Enoch Arden, as he has 
enhanced and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of 
imagery and illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself ! 
A sailor who sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up 
selling fish, goes to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays 
there some years, on his return finds his wife married to a 
miller, speaks to a landlady on the subject, and dies. Told 
in the pure and simple, the unadorned and classical style, this 
story would not have taken three pages, but Mr. Tennyson has 
been able to make it the principal — the largest tale in his new 
volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and inci- 
dent in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a 
great deal about the torrid zone, which a rough sailor like Enoch 
Arden certainly would not have perceived ; and he gives to the 
fishing village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a 
fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality. 

The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is 
thrown, is an absolute model of adorned art : — 



292 ORNATE ART 

" The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns 
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, 
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, 
The lightning flash of insect and of bird, 
The lustre of the long convolvuluses 
That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran 
Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows 
And glories of the broad belt of the world, 
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen 
He could not see, the kindly human face, 
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard 
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, 
The league-long roller thundering on the reef, 
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd 
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep 
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave. 
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long 
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, 
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail : 
No sail from day to day, but every day 
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
Among the palms and ferns and precipices; 
The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 
The blaze upon his island overhead; 
The blaze upon the waters to the west; 
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail." 



No expressive circumstances can be added to this description, no 
enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the 
description of Enoch's Hfe before he sailed : — 



' While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas. 
Or often journeying landward ; for in truth 
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil 
In ocean-smelling osier, and his face 
Rough-redden'd with a thousand winter gales, 
Not only to the market-cross were known, 
But in the leafy lanes behind the down, 
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp, 
And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall, 
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering." 



WALTER BAGEHOT 293 

So much has not often been made of selling fish. The essence 
of ornate art is in this manner to accumulate round the typical 
object, everything which can be said about it, every associated 
thought that can be connected with it, without impairing the 
essence of the delineation. 

The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art — the first 
which arrests the mere reader of it — is what is called a want of 
simplicity. Nothing is described as it is ; everything has about it 
an atmosphere of something else. The combined and associated 
thoughts, though they set off and heighten particular ideas and 
aspects of the central and typical conception, yet complicate it : 
a simple thing — " a daisy by the river's brim " — is never left by 
itself, something else is put with it ; something not more con- 
nected with it than " lion- whelp " and the "peacock yew-tree" 
are with the " fresh fish for sale " that Enoch carries past them. 
Even in the highest cases, ornate art leaves upon a cultured and 
delicate taste, the conviction that it is not the highest art, that it 
is somehow excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste in itself or 
chastening to the mind that sees it — that it is in an explained 
manner unsatisfactory, " a thing in which we feel there is some 
hidden want ! " 

That want is a want of " definition." We must all know land- 
scapes, river landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense 
beautiful, which when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure ; 
which in some — and these the best cases — give even a gentle 
sense of surprise that such things should be so beautiful, and yet 
when we come to live in them, to spend even a few hours in them, 
we seem stifled and oppressed. On the other hand there are peo- 
ple to whom the sea-shore is a companion, an exhilaration ; and 
not so much for the brawl of the shore as for the limited vastness, 
the finite infinite of the ocean as they see it. Such people often 
come home braced and nerved, and if they spoke out the truth, 
would have only to say, " We have seen the horizon line " ; if they 
were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it hour after hour, so 
great to them is the fascination, so full the sustaining calm, which 
they gain from that union of form and greatness. To a very infe- 
rior extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent which most people 
understand better, a common arch will have the same effect. 



294 



ORNATE ART 



A bridge completes a river landscape ; if of the old and many- 
arched sort, it regulates by a long series of defined forms the vague 
outline of wood and river, which before had nothing to measure 
it ; if of the new scientific sort, it introduces still more strictly a 
geometrical element ; it stiffens the scenery which was before too 
soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the eifect of pure 
style in literary art. It calms by conciseness ; while the ornate 
style leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of fascination, 
a complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the sim- 
ple, defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is 
chaste chastens ; there is a poised energy — a state half thrill, half 
tranquillity — which pure art gives, which no other can give; a 
pleasure justified as well as felt ; an ennobled satisfaction at what 
ought to satisfy us, and must ennoble us. 

Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. 
It is impossible to deny that a touch of colour does bring out cer- 
tain parts ; does convey certain expressions ; does heighten certain 
features, but it leaves on the work as a whole, a want, as we say, 
" of something " ; a want of that inseparable chasteness which 
cHngs to simple sculpture, an impairing predominance of alluring 
details which impairs our satisfaction with our own satisfaction ; 
which makes us doubt whether a higher being than ourselves will 
be satisfied even though we are so. In the very same manner, 
though the rouge of ornate literature excites our eye, it also 
impairs our confidence. 

Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying, self-prov- 
ing purity of style is commoner in ancient literature than in 
modern literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an 
unmixed example of it. No one can say that he is. His works 
are full of undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of 
style ; except by a miracle, nothing in the Elizabethan age could 
be a mddel of style ; the restraining taste of that age was feebler 
and more mistaken than that of any other equally great age. 
Shakespeare's mind so teemed with creation that he required the 
most just, most forcible, most constant restraint from without. 
He most needed to be guided among poets, and he was the least 
and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his works finished 
models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has many 



^c^.. 



WALTER BAGEHOT 295 



passages of the most pure style, passages which could be easily 
cited if space served. And we must remember that the task 
which Shakespeare undertook was the most difficult which any 
poet has ever attempted, and that it is a task in which after a 
million efforts every other poet has failed. The Elizabethan 
drama — as Shakespeare has immortalised it — undertakes to 
delineate in five acts, under stage restrictions, and in mere dia- 
logue, a whole list of dra7natis personce, a set of characters enough 
for a modern novel, and with the distinctness of a modern novel. 
Shakespeare is not content to give two or three great characters in 
solitude and in dignity, like the classical dramatists ; he wishes to 
give a whole party of characters in the play of life, and according 
to the nature of each. He would " hold the mirror up to nature," 
not to catch a monarch in a tragic posture, but a whole group of 
characters engaged in many actions, intent on many purposes, 
thinking many thoughts. There is life enough, there is action 
enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an ancient dram- 
atist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His charac- 
ters, taken en masse, and as a whole, are as well known as any 
novelist's characters ; cultivated men know all about them, as 
young ladies know all about Mr. TroUope's novels. But no other 
dramatist has succeeded in such an aim. No one else's charac- 
ters are staple people in English literature, hereditary people whom 
every one knows all about in every generation. The contempo- 
rary dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, 
etc., had many merits, some of them were great men. But a 
critic must say of them the worst thing he has to say: "They 
were men who failed in their characteristic aim; " they attempted 
to describe numerous sets of complicated characters, and they 
failed. No one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in com- 
mon memory; the Faustus of Marlowe, a really great idea, is 
not remembered. They undertook to write what they could not 
write — five acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the 
fine individual things they conceived are forgotten by the mixed 
multitude, and known only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish 
theatre we cannot speak ; but there are no such characters in any 
French tragedy : the whole aim of that tragedy forbad it. Goethe 
has added to literature a few great characters ; he may be said 



296 ORNATE ART 

almost to have added to literature the idea of " intellectual crea- 
tion," — the idea of describing the great characters through the 
intellect ; but he has not added to the common stock what Shake- 
speare added, a new multitude of men and women ; and these not 
in simple attitudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with 
all their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The sever- 
est art must have allowed many details, much overflowing circum- 
stance, to a poet who undertook to describe what almost defies 
description. Pure art would have commanded him to use details 
lavishly, for only by a multiplicity of such could the required effect 
have been at all produced. Shakespeare could accomphsh it, for 
his mind was a spring, an inexhaustible fountain, of human nature, 
and it is no wonder that being compelled by the task of his time 
to let the fulness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it over- 
flow too much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superflu- 
ous images characters and conceptions which would have been far 
more justly, far more effectually, delineated with conciseness and 
simplicity. But there is an infinity of pure art in Shakespeare 
although there is a great deal else also. 

It will be said, if ornate art be, as you say, an inferior species 
of art, why should it ever be used ? If pure art be the best sort 
of art, why should it not always be used ? 

The reason is this : literary art, as we just now explained, is 
concerned with literatesque characters in literatesque situations ; 
and the best art is concerned with the 7nost literatesque characters 
in the most literatesque situations. Such are the objects of pure 
art ; it embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most 
select and choice circumstances, the highest conceptions ; but it 
does not follow that only the best subjects are to be treated by 
art, and then only in the very best way. Human nature could 
not endure such a critical commandment as that, and it would be 
an erroneous criticism which gave it. Any literatesque character 
may be described in literature under any circumstances which 
exhibit its literatesqueness. 

The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it 
is, and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many 
inferior things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless 
ought to be described in books. A certain kind of literature deals 



WALTER BAGEHOT 297 

with illusions, and this kind of literature has given a colouring to 
the name romantic. A man of rare genius, and even of poetical 
genius, has gone so far as to make these illusions the true subject 
of poetry — almost the sole subject. 

*' Without," says Father Newman, of one of his characters,^ 
" being himself a poet, he was in the season of poetry, in the 
sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful because it is 
new. Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful as his ; 
not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as such, 
but because when we first see things, we see them in a gay con- 
fusion, which is a principal element of the poetical. As time 
goes on, and we number and sort and measure things, — as we 
gain views, we advance towards philosophy and truth, but we 
recede from poetry. 

" When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on 
a hot summer day from Oxford to Newington — a dull road, as 
any one who has gone it knows ; yet it was new to us ; and we 
protest to you, reader, believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will, 
to us it seemed on that occasion quite touchingly beautiful ; and 
a soft melancholy came over us, of which the shadows fall even 
now, when we look upon that dusty, weary journey. And why? 
because every object which met us was unknown and full of 
mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the beginning 
of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly ; a hill implied a 
vale beyond, with that vale's history ; the bye-lanes, with their 
green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost to the 
imagination. Such was our first journey ; but when we had gone 
over it several times, the mind refused to act, the scene ceased to 
enchant, stern reahty alone remained ; and we thought it one of 
the most tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse." 

That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a 
" gay confusion," a rich medley which does not exist in the actual 
world — which perhaps could not exist in any world — but which 
would seem pretty if it did exist. Every one who reads Enoch 
Arden will perceive that this notion of all poetry is exactly ap- 
plicable to this one poem. Whatever be made of Enoch's " Ocean 
spoil in ocean-smelling osier," of the " portal-warding lion-whelp," 

1 Charles Reding, in Loss and Gain, volume i, chapter 3. 



298 ORNATE ART 

and the " peacock yew-tree," every one knows that in himself 
Enoch could not have been charming. People who sell fish about 
the country (and that is what he did, though Mr. Tennyson won't 
speak out, and wraps it up) never are beautiful. As Enoch was 
and must be coarse, in itself the poem must depend for a charm 
on a " gay confusion " — on a splendid accumulation of impossible 
accessories. 

Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us — he knows 
the country world ; he has proved that no one living knows it 
better; he has painted with pure art — with art which describes 
what is a race perhaps more refined, more delicate, more conscien- 
tious, than the sailor — the Northern Farmei- and we all know 
what a splendid, what a living thing, he has made of it. He could, 
if he only would, have given us the ideal sailor in like manner — the 
ideal of the natural sailor we mean — the characteristic present 
man as he lives and is. But this he has not chosen. He has 
endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor, at an exceptionally 
refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of relinquishment. 
And with this task before him, his profound taste taught him that 
ornate art was a necessary medium — was the sole effectual instru- 
ment — for his purpose. It was necessary for him if possible to 
abstract the mind from reality, to induce us ;?<?/ to conceive or 
think of sailors as they are while we are reading of his sailors, 
but to think of what a person who did not know, might fancy 
sailors to be. A casual traveller on the seashore, with the sen- 
sitive mood and the romantic imagination Dr. Newman has 
described, might fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to be like 
that. Accordingly, Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off 
the stress of fancy from real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it 
with pretty accessories ; to engage it on the " peacock yew-tree," 
and the "portal-warding lion-whelp." Nothing, too, can be more 
splendid than the description of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson 
delineates them, but a sailor would not have felt the tropics in 
that manner. The beauties of nature would not have so much 
occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet shafts 
of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in Robin- 
son Crusoe, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments 
would have been the principal subject to him. " For three years," 
he might have said, " my back was bad ; and then I put two pegs 



WALTER BAGEHOT 299 

into a piece of drift-wood and so made a chair \ and after that it 
pleased God to send me a chill." In real life his piety would 
scarcely have gone beyond that. 

It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, 
and even no explicit consciousness of, the splendid details of the 
torrid zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inex- 
pressible conception of them : though he could not speak of them 
or describe them, yet they were much to him. And doubtless 
such is the case. Rude people are impressed by what is beauti- 
ful — deeply impressed — though they could not describe what 
they see, or what they feel. But what is absurd in Mr. Tenny- 
son's description — absurd when we extract it from the gorgeous 
additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts us — 
is, that his hero feels nothing else but these great splendours. We 
hear nothing of the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low 
superstitions, which really would have been the first things, the 
favourite and principal occupations of his mind. Just so when he 
gets home he may have had such fine sentiments, though it is odd, 
and he may have spoken of them to his landlady, though that is 
odder still, — but it is incredible that his whole mind should be 
made up of fine sentiments. Besides those sweet feelings, if he 
had them, there must have been many more obvious, more pro- 
saic, and some perhaps more healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown 
a profound judgment in distracting us as he does. He has given 
us a classic delineation of the Northern Farmer with no ornament 
at all — as bare a thing as can be — because he then wanted to 
describe a true type of real men ; he has given us a sailor crowded 
all over with ornament and illustration, because he then wanted 
to describe an unreal type of fancied men, — not sailors as they 
are, but sailors as they might be wished. 

Another prominent element in Enoch Arden is yet more suit- 
able to, yet more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson 
undertook to deal with half belief. The presentiments which 
Annie feels are exactly of that sort which everybody has felt, and 
which every one has half believed — which hardly any one has 
more than half believed. Almost every one, it has been said, 
would be angry if any one else reported that he believed in ghosts ; 
yet hardly any one, when thinking by himself, wholly disbelieves 



300 ORNATE ART 

them. Just so such presentiments as Mr. Tennyson depicts, 
impress the inner mind so much that the outer mind — the 
rational understanding — hardly likes to consider them nicely or 
to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious themes an ornate 
or complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out what it has to 
say plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate ; it describes 
in concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really believes in 
presentiments, he can speak out in pure style. One who could 
have been a poet — one of the few in any age of whom one can 
say certainly that they could have been and have not been — has 
spoken thus : — 

" When Heaven sends sorrow, 
Warnings go first, 
Lest it should burst 
With stunning might 
On souls too bright 

To fear the morrow. 

" Can science bear us 

To the hid springs 
Of human things? 
Why may not dream, 
Or thought's day-gleam, 
Startle, yet cheer. 

" Are such thoughts fetters. 
While faith disowns 
Dread of earth's tones, 
Recks but Heaven's call, 
And on the wall, 

Reads but Heaven's letters? "^ 

But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not 
true ; if he wishes to leave his readers in doubt ; if he wishes an 
atmosphere of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must 
use the romantic style, the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the 
style " which shirks, not meets " your intellect, the style which, as 
you are scrutinising, disappears. 

Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson, which Enoch 

1 John Henry Newman's Warnmgs. 



WALTER BAGEHOT 3OI 

Arden may suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is 
the appropriate art for an unpleashig type. Many of the characters 
of real hfe, if brought distinctly, prominently, and plainly before 
the mind, as they really are, if shown in their inner nature, their 
actual essence, are doubtless very unpleasant. They would be 
horrid to meet and horrid to think of. We fear it must be owned 
that Enoch Arden is this kind of person. A dirty sailor who did 
not go home to his wife is not an agreeable being : a varnish must 
be put on him to make him shine. It is true that he acts rightly ; 
that he is very good. But such is human nature that it finds 
a little tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue belongs to a 
charity-school girl, and has a taint of the catechism. All of us 
feel this, though most of us are too timid, too scrupulous, too 
anxious about the virtue of others to speak out. We are ashamed 
of our nature in this respect, but it is not the less our nature. 
And if we look deeper into the matter there are many reasons 
why we should not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and, 
as we necessarily believe, of beings greater than man, has many 
parts besides its moral part. It has an intellectual part, an artis- 
tic part, even a religious part, in which mere morals have no 
share. In Shakespeare or Goethe, even in Newton or Archimedes, 
there is much which will not be cut down to the shape of the 
commandments. They have thoughts, feelings, hopes — immor- 
tal thoughts and hopes — which have influenced the life of men, 
and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the " whole 
duty of man," the ethical compendium, does not recognise. 
Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean 
mind. A highly developed moral nature joined to an unde- 
veloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and 
a very hmited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It repre- 
sents a bit of human nature — a good bit, of course — but a bit 
only, in disproportionate, unnatural, and revolting prominence ; 
and, therefore, unless an artist use deUcate care, we are offended. 
The dismal act of a squalid man needed many condiments to 
make it pleasant, and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right to mix 
them subtly and to use them freely. 

A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon 
paper. A heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though 



302 CHARLES LAMB 

it end in a defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature 
likes to see itself look grand, and it looks grand when it is making 
a brave struggle with foreign foes. But it does not look grand 
when it is divided against itself. An excellent person striving 
with temptation is a very admirable being in reality, but he is 
not a pleasant being in description. We hope he will win and 
overcome his temptation ; but we feel that he would be a more 
interesting being, a higher being, if he had not felt that tempta- 
tion so much. The poet must make the struggle great in order 
to make the self-denial virtuous, and if the struggle be too great, 
we are apt to feel some mixture of contempt. The internal meta- 
physics of a divided nature are but an inferior subject for art, but 
if they are to be made attractive, much else must be combined 
with them. If the excellence of Hainlet had depended on the 
ethical qualities of Hamlet, it would not have been the master- 
piece of our literature. He acts virtuously of course, and kills 
the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that such good- 
ness would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome 
prince and a puzzling meditative character ; these secular quali- 
ties relieve his moral excellence, and so he becomes " nice." 
In proportion as an artist has to deal with types essentially im- 
perfect, he must disguise their imperfections ; he must accumu- 
late around them as many first-rate accessories as may make his 
readers forget that they are themselves second-rate. The sudden 
viillionaii-es of the present day hope to disguise their social de- 
fects by buying old places, and hiding among aristocratic furni- 
ture ; just so a great artist who has to deal with characters 
artistically imperfect, will use an ornate style, will fit them into 
a scene where there is much else to look at. 

For these reasons ornate art is, within the limits, as legitimate 
as pure art. It does what pure art could not do. The very 
excellence of pure art confines its employment. Precisely be- 
cause it gives the best things by themselves and exactly as they 
are, it fails when it is necessary to describe inferior things among 
other things, with a list of enhancements and a crowd of accom- 
paniments that in reaUty do not belong to it. Illusion, half belief, 
unpleasant types, imperfect types, are as much the proper sphere 
of ornate art, as an inferior landscape is the proper sphere for 



WALTER PATER 3O3 

the true efificacy of moonlight. A really great landscape needs 
sunlight and bears sunlight ; but moonlight is an equaliser of 
beauties ; it gives a romantic unreality to what will not stand the 
bare truth. And just so does romantic art. 



CHARLES LAMB 

WALTER PATER 
[From Appreciations, 1889.] 

Those English critics who at the beginning of the present cen- 
tury introduced from Germany, together with some other subtle- 
ties of thought transplanted hither not without advantage, the dis- 
tinction between the Fancy and the Lnaginatioji, made much also 
of the cognate distinction between IVii and Humour, between 
that unreal and transitory mirth, which is as the crackling of 
thorns under the pot, and the laughter which blends with tears 
and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and which, in its 
most exquisite motives, is one with pity — the laughter of the 
comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less expressive than his moods 
of seriousness or solemnity, of that deeply stirred soul of sympathy 
in him, as flowing from which both tears and laughter are alike 
genuine and contagious. 

This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other 
kindred critics applied, with much eifect, in their studies 0/ some 
of our older English writers. And as the distinction between 
imagination and fancy, made popular by Wordsworth, found its 
best justification in certain essential differences of stuff in Words- 
worth's own writings, so this other critical distinction, between wit 
and humour, finds a sort of visible interpretation and instance in 
the character and writings of Charles Lamb ; — one who lived 
more consistently than most writers among subtle literary theories, 
and whose remains are still full of curious interest for the student 
of literature as a fine art. 

The author of the English Hu?nourists of the Eighteenth Century, 
coming to the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as 
is true pre-eminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in 
them deepened by the deeper subjectivity, the in tenser and closer 



304 CHARLES LAMB 

living witli itself, which is characteristic of the temper of the later 
generation ; and therewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of 
which with pity humour proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, 
for example, freer and more boisterous. 

To this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our 
literature, the writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the 
last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the 
nineteenth, are a transition ; and such union of grave, of terrible 
even, with gay, we may note in the circumstances of his life, as 
reflected thence into his work. We catch the aroma of a singular, 
homely sweetness about his first years, spent on Thames' side, 
amid the red bricks and terraced gardens, with their rich historical 
memories of old-fashioned legal London. Just above the poorer 
class, deprived, as he says, of the "sweet food of academic insti- 
tution," he is fortunate enough to be reared in the classical lan- 
guages at an ancient school, where he becomes the companion of 
Coleridge, as at a later period he was his enthusiastic disciple. 
So far, the years go by with less than the usual share of boyish 
difficulties ; protected, one fancies, seeing what he was after- 
wards, by some attraction of temper in the quaint child, small and 
delicate, with a certain Jewish expression in his clear, brown com- 
plexion, eyes not precisely of the same colour, and a slow walk add- 
ing to the staidness of his figure ; and whose infirmity of speech, 
increased by agitation, is partly engaging. 

And the cheerfulness of all this, of the mere aspect of Lamb's 
quiet subsequent fife also, might make the more superficial reader 
think of him as in himself something slight, and of his mirth as 
cheaply bought. Yet we know that beneath this blithe surface 
there was something of the fateful domestic horror, of the beauti- 
ful heroism and devotedness too, of old Greek tragedy. His 
sister Mary, ten years his senior, in a sudden paroxysm of mad- 
ness, caused the death of her mother, and was brought to trial 
for what an overstrained justice might have construed as the 
greatest of crimes. She was released on the brother's pledging 
himself to watch over her ; and to this sister, from the age of 
twenty-one, Charles Lamb sacrificed himself, " seeking thence- 
forth," says his earliest biographer, " no connexion which could 
interfere with her supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability 



WALTER PATER 305 

to sustain and comfort her." The " feverish, romantic tie of 
love " he cast away in exchange for the " charities of home." 
Only, from time to time, the madness returned, affecting him too, 
once ; and we see the brother and sister voluntarily yielding to 
restraint. In estimating the humour of Elia, we must no more 
forget the strong undercurrent of this great misfortune and pity, 
than one could forget it in his actual story. So he becomes the 
best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a dramatist of genius 
so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre. Rosa?nund Grey, 
written in his twenty-third year, a story with something bitter and 
exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible in it, 
strikes clearly this note in his work. 

For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his 
gift, of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monoto- 
nous labour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very impor- 
tant thing ; availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them 
a httle, chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned 
with the turning of the tides of the great world. And yet this 
very modesty, this unambitious way of conceiving his work, has 
impressed upon it a certain exceptional enduringness. For of the 
remarkable Enghsh writers contemporary with Lamb, many were 
greatly preoccupied with ideas of practice — religious, moral, 
political — ideas which have since, in some sense or other, entered 
permanently into the general consciousness ; and, these having 
no longer any stimulus for a generation provided with a different 
stock of ideas, the writings of those who spent so much of them- 
selves in their propagation have lost, with posterity, something of 
what they gained by them in immediate influence. Coleridge, 
Wordsworth, Shelley even — sharing so largely in the unrest of 
their own age, and made personally more interesting thereby, yet, 
of their actual work, surrender more to the mere course of time 
than some of those who may have seemed to exercise themselves 
hardly at all in great matters, to have been little serious, or a little 
indifferent, regarding them. 

Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller 
in England than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making 
of prose he realises the principle of art for its own sake, as com- 
pletely as Keats in the making of verse. And, working ever close 



306 CHARLES LAMB 

to the concrete, to the details, great or small, of actual things, 
books, persons, and with no part of them, blurred to his vision by 
the intervention of mere abstract theories, he has reached an 
enduring moral effect also, in a sort of boundless sympathy. 
Unoccupied, as he might seem, with great matters, he is in 
immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing 
littleness, that littleness in which there is much of the whole woe- 
ful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect 
understanding of it. What sudden, unexpected touches of pathos 
in him ! — bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the Welt- 
schmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with 
him : but what a gift also for the enjoyment of life in its subtle'ties, 
of enjoyment actually refined by the need of some thoughtful 
economies and making the most of things ! Little arts of happi- 
ness he is ready to teach to others. The quaint remarks of chil- 
dren which another would scarcely have heard, he preserves — 
little flies in the priceless amber of his Attic wit — and has his 
"Praise of chimney-sweepers " (as William Blake has written, with 
so much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's Song), valuing 
carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white sheets in 
stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story, anticipating 
something of the mood of our deep humourists of the last genera- 
tion. His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident, or 
unkindness of nature, blindness for instance, or fateful disease of 
mind Uke his sister's, has something primitive in its largeness ; 
and on behalf of ill-used animals he is early in composing a Pity's 
Gift. 

And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead do care at 
all for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shake- 
speare and Webster have been stirred, after so long converse with 
things that stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at 
his exquisite appreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of 
Hogarth too ; for, what has not been observed so generally as the 
excellence of his Uterary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of 
painting also. It was as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for 
Shakespeare's self first, for instance, and then for Shakespeare's 
readers, that that too was done : he has the true scholar's way of 
forgetting himself in his subject. For though " defrauded," as we 



WALTER PATER 307 

saw, in his young years, " of the sweet food of academic institu- 
tion," he is yet essentially a scholar, and all his work mainly ret- 
rospective, as I said ; his own sorrows, affections, perceptions, 
being alone real to him of the present. " I cannot make these 
present times," he says once, "present to me.'^ 

Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently 
valuable, but for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old 
English drama. " The book is such as I am glad there should 
be," he modestly says of the Specimens of English Dramatic Poets 
who lived about the time of Shakespeare ; to which, however, he 
adds in a series of notes the very quintessence of criticism, the 
choicest savour and perfume of Elizabethan poetry being sorted, 
and stored here, with a sort of delicate intellectual epicureanism, 
which has had the effect of winning for these, then almost forgot- 
ten, poets, one generation after another of enthusiastic students. 
Could he but have known how fresh a source of culture he was 
evoking there for other generations, through all those years in 
which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the limitation of his 
time by business, and sigh for a better fortune in regard to literary 
opportunities ! 

To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the lit- 
erary charm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess j\ / 
of Newcastle ; and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to^, ^^^ 
others — he seeming to himself but to hand on to others, in mere ' 
humble ministration, that of which for them he is really the crea- ;■ , 
tor — this is the way of his criticism ; cast off in a stray letter 
often, or passing note, or lightest essay or conversation. It is in | 
such a letter, for instance, that we come upon a singularly pene- \ 
trative estimate of the genius and writings of Defoe. 

Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of i 
their production to its starting-point in the deep places of the 1 
mind, he seems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of 
Hogarth or Shakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities 
which have swayed their actual work; or "puts up," and takes, 
the one morsel of good stuff in an old, forgotten writer. Even 
in what he says casually there comes an aroma of old English ; 
noticeable echoes, in chance turn and phrase, of the great masters 
of style, the old masters. Godwin, seeing in quotation a passage 



308 CHARLES LAMB 

from John Woodvil, takes it for a choice fragment of an old drama- 
tist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding the author. His 
power of dehcate imitation in prose and verse reaches the length 
of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on Popular 
Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir Thomas 
Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by disinter- 
ested study, of those elements of the man which were the real source 
of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, ready to say 
what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continually overawes 
one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar. For it 
is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations of 
expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of vocabu- 
lary — things, alas! dying out in the English literature of the 
present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature 
of the past — that his literary mission is chiefly concerned. And 
yet, delicate, refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when 
he writes of giants such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often 
but in a stray note, you catch the sense of veneration with which 
those great names in past literature and art brooded over his 
intelligence, his undiminished impressibility by the great effects 
in them. Reading, commenting on Shakespeare, he is like a man 
who walks alone under a grand stormy sky, and among unwonted 
tricks of light, when powerful spirits might seem to be abroad 
upon the air ; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he analyses it, 
rises into a kind of spectral grotesque ; while he too knows the 
secret of fine, significant touches like theirs. 

There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress, 
surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so 
vividly into The Rake's Progress, or Marriage a la Mode, con- 
cerning which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or 
even worthless in themselves, they have come to please us at last 
as things picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our 
different age. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture — 
types of cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever 
meant to preserve — we contemplate with more than good-nature, 
as having in them the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to 
be replaced by its more solemn and self-conscious deposits ; like 
those tricks of individuality which we find quite tolerable in per- 



WALTER PATER 



309 



sons, because they convey to us the secret of lifelike expression, 
and with regard to which we are all to some extent humourists. 
But it is part of the privilege of the genuine humourist to anticipate 
this pensive mood with regard to the ways and things of his own 
day ; to look upon the tricks in manner of the hfe about him with 
that same refined, purged sort of vision, which will come naturally 
to those of a later generation, in observing whatever may have 
survived by chance of its mere external habit. Seeing things 
always by the light of an understanding more entire than is pos- 
sible for ordinary minds, of the whole mechanism of humanity, 
and seeing also the manner, the outward mode or fashion, always 
in strict connexion with the spiritual condition which determined 
it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb anticipates the enchantment 
of distance ; and the characteristics of places, ranks, habits of life, 
are transfigured for him, even now and in advance of time, by 
poetic light ; justifying what some might condemn as mere senti- 
mentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the tradition of such 
fashion or accent. "The praise of beggars," "the cries of Lon- 
don," the traits of actors just grown " old," the spots in " town " 
where the country, its fresh green and fresh water, still lingered 
on, one after another, amidst the bustle ; the quaint, dimmed, 
just played-out farces, he had relished so much, coming partly 
through them to understand the earlier English theatre as a thing 
once really alive ; those fountains and sun-dials of old gardens, of 
which he entertains such dainty discourse : — he feels the poetry 
of these things, as the poetry of things old indeed, but surviving 
as an actual part of the life of the present, and as something quite 
different from the poetry of things flatly gone from us and antique, 
which come back to us, if at all, as entire strangers, like Scott's 
old Scotch-border personages, their oaths and armour. Such gift 
of appreciation depends, as I said, on the habitual apprehension 
of men's life as a whole — its organic wholeness, as extending 
even to the least things in it — of its outward manner in connex- 
ion with its inward temper ; and it involves a fine perception of 
the congruities, the musical accordance between humanity and its 
environment of custom, society, personal intercourse ; as if all this, 
with its meetings, partings, ceremonies, gesture, tones of speech, were 
some delicate instrument on which an expert performer is playing. 



310 CHARLES LAMB 

These are some of the characteristics of Elia, one essentially an 
essayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, " never judging," as 
he says, " system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars " ; say- 
ing all things as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of 
pastime, yet succeeding thus, "glimpse-wise," in catching and 
recording more frequently than others " the gayest, happiest atti- 
tude of things " ; a casual writer for dreamy readers, yet always 
giving the reader so much more than he seemed to propose. 
There is something of the follower of George Fox about him, and 
the Quaker's behef in the inward light coming to one passive, to 
the mere wayfarer, who will be sure at all events to lose no light 
which falls by the way — glimpses, suggestions, delightful half- 
apprehensions, profound thoughts of old philosophers, hints of the 
innermost reason in things, the full knowledge of which is held in 
reserve ; all the varied stuff, that is, of which genuine essays are 
made. 

And with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture 
is, below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writ- 
ing at all — a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that 
modern subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque ele- 
ment in Uterature. What he designs is to give you himself, to 
acquaint you with his likeness ; but must do this, if at all, indi- 
rectly, being indeed always more or less reserved, for himself and 
his friends ; friendship counting for so much in his life, that he 
is jealous of anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the 
length of a sort of insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint 
" praise " ; this lover of stage plays significantly welcoming a Httle 
touch of the artificiahty of play to sweeten the intercourse of 
actual life. 

And, in effect, a very delicate and expressive portrait of him 
does put itself together for the duly meditative reader. In indi- 
rect touches of his own work, scraps of faded old letters, what 
others remembered of his talk, the man's likeness emerges ; what 
he laughed and wept at, his sudden elevations, and longings after 
absent friends, his fine casuistries of affection and devices to jog 
sometimes, as he says, the lazy happiness of perfect love, his 
solemn moments of higher discourse with the young, as they came 
across him on occasion, and went along a little way with him, the 



WALTER PATER 31I 

sudden, surprised apprehension of beauties in old literature, reveal- 
ing anew the deep soul of poetry in things, and withal the pure 
spirit of fun, having its way again ; laughter, that most short-lived 
of all things (some of Shakespeare's even being grown hollow) 
wearing well with him. Much of all this comes out through his 
letters, which may be regarded as a department of his essays. He 
is an old-fashioned letter-writer, the essence of the old fashion of 
letter-writing lying, as with true essay-writing, in the dexterous 
availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in the prosecution 
of deeper lines of observation ; although, just as with the record 
of his conversation, one loses something, in losing the actual 
tones of the stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he halted 
also in composition, composing slowly and by fits, " like a Flemish 
painter," as he tells us, so "it is to be regretted," says the editor 
of his letters, " that in the printed letters the reader will lose the 
curious varieties of writing with which the originals abound, and 
which are scrupulously adapted to the subject." 

Also, he was a true " collector," delighting in the personal find- 
ing of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by 
the little accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's 
Emblevis, "that old book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds 
it at last, he values none the less because a child had coloured the 
plates with his paints. A lover of household warmth everywhere, 
of that tempered atmosphere which our various habitations get by 
men's living within them, he "sticks to his favourite books as he 
did to his friends," and loved the " town," with a jealous eye for 
all its characteristics, " old houses " coming to have souls for him. 
The yearning for mere warmth against him in another, makes him 
content, all through Ufe, with pure brotherliness, " the most kindly 
and natural species of love," as he says, in place of the passion of 
love. Brother and sister, sitting thus side by side, have, of course, 
their anticipations how one of them must sit at last in the faint 
sun alone, and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely what 
amount of melancholy really accompanied for him the approach 
of old age, so steadily foreseen ; make us note also, with pleasure, 
his successive wakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious 
musing over what is gone and what remains, of life. In his subtle 
capacity for enjoying the more refined points of earth, of human 



312 CHARLES LAMB 

relationship, he could throw the gleam of poetry or humour on 
what seemed common or threadbare ; has a care for the sighs, and 
the weary, humdrum preoccupations of very weak people, down 
to their little pathetic "gentilities," even; while, in the purely 
human temper, he can write of death, almost like Shakespeare. 

And that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what 
is accustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging 
to home and the earth, was congruous also with that love for the 
accustomed in religion, which we may notice in him. He is one of 
the last votaries of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings 
of hope and awe, which may be described as the religion of men 
of letters (as Sir Thomas Browne has his Religion of the Physician) , 
religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last 
century, Addison, Gray, and Johnson ; by Jane Austen and Thack- 
eray, later. A high way of feeling developed largely by constant 
intercourse with the great things of literature, and extended in its 
turn to those matters greater still, this religion Hves, in the main 
retrospectively, in a system of received sentiments and beliefs ; 
received, like those great things of literature and art, in the first 
instance, on the authority of a long tradition, in the course of 
which they have linked themselves in a thousand complex ways to 
the conditions of human life, and no more questioned now than 
the feeling one keeps by one of the greatness — say ! of Shake- 
speare. For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes the 
solemn background on which the nearer and more exciting objects 
of his immediate experience reheve themselves, borrowing from it 
an expression of calm ; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a 
profound quiet, that quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental 
efficacy, working, we might say, on the principle of the opus ope- 
ratiim, almost without any co-operation of one's own, towards the 
assertion of the higher self. And, in truth, to men of Lamb's 
delicately attuned temperament mere physical stillness has its full 
value ; such natures seeming to long for it sometimes, as for no 
merely negative thing, with a sort of mystical sensuaUty. 

The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the 
value of reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his 
humour, and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or 



WALTER PATER 313 

accidental character of his work, there Hes, as I said at starting, as 
in his hfe, a genuinely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at its 
darkest in those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, is always there, 
though not always realised either for himself or his readers, and re- 
strained always in utterance. It gives to those lighter matters on 
the surface of life and literature among which he for the most part 
moved, a wonderful force of expression, as if at any moment these 
slight words and fancies might pierce very far into the deeper 
soul of things. In his writing, as in his life, that quiet is not the 
low-flying of one from the first drowsy by choice, and needing the 
prick of some strong passion or worldly ambition, to stimulate him 
into all the energy of which he is capable ; but rather the reaction 
of nature, after an escape from fate, dark and insane as in old 
Greek tragedy, following upon which the sense of mere relief be- 
comes a kind of passion, as with one who, having narrowly escaped 
earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing for grateful tears in just sit- 
ting quiet at home, under the wall, till the end of days. 

He felt the genius of places ; and I sometimes think he re- 
sembles the places he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell 
— London, sixty-five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old 
theatres, and the Temple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding 
down, and beyond to north and south the fields at Enfield or 
Hampton, to which, "' with their living trees," the thoughts wan- 
der " from the hard wood of the desk " — fields fresher, and com- 
ing nearer to town then, but in one of which the , present writer 
remembers, on a brooding early summer's day, to have heard the 
cuckoo for the first time. Here, the surface of things is certainly 
humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where the child 
goes a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things more apt 
to respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much dif- 
ference between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll 
together more grandly ; those quaint suburban pastorals gathering 
a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great 
city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the 
rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples. 

187S. 



314 THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

JOHN RUSKIN 
[Part iv., chapter 12, oi Modern Painters, 1856.] 

I. German dulness, and English affectation, have of late much 
multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable 
words that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysi- 
cians, — namely, "Objective" and " Subjective." 

No words can be more exquisitely, and in all points, useless ; 
and I merely speak of them that I may, at once and for ever, get 
them out of my way, and out of my reader's. But to get that 
done, they must be explained. 

The word " Blue," say certain philosophers, means the sensa- 
tion of colour which the human eye receives in looking at the 
open sky, or at a bell gentian. 

Now, say they farther, as this sensation can only be felt when 
the eye is turned to the object, and as, therefore, no such sensa- 
tion is produced by the object when nobody looks at it, there- 
fore the thing, when it is not looked at, is not blue ; and thus 
(say they) there are many qualities of things which depend as 
much on something else as on themselves. To be sweet, a thing 
must have a taster ; it is only sweet while it is being tasted, and 
if the tongue had not the capacity of taste, then the sugar would 
not have the quality of sweetness. 

And then they agree that the qualities of things which thus 
depend upon our perception of them, and upon our human nature 
as affected by them, shall be called Subjective ; and the quali- 
ties of things which they always have, irrespective of any other 
nature,^ as roundness or squareness, shall be called Objective. 

From these ingenious views the step is very easy to a farther 
opinion, that it does not much matter what things are in them- 
selves, but only what they are to us ; and that the only real 
truth of them is their appearance to, or- effect upon, us. From 
which position, with a hearty desire for mystification, and much 
egotism, selfishness, shallowness, and impertinence, a philosopher 
may easily go so far as to believe, and say, that everything in 



JOHN RUSK IN 315 

the world depends upon his seeing or thinking of it, and that 
nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees or thinks of. 

2. Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and troublesome 
words at once, be it observed that the word " Blue " does not 
mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye ; but 
it means the pozver of producing that sensation ; and this power 
is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience 
it or not, and would remain there though there were not left a 
man on the face of the earth. Precisely in the same way gun- 
powder has a power of exploding. It will not explode if you 
put no match to it. But it has always the power of so exploding, 
and is therefore called an explosive compound, which it very 
positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say to the 
contrary. 

In like manner, a gentian does not produce the sensation of 
blueness if you don't look at it. But it has always the power of 
doing so ; its particles being everlastingly so arranged by its 
Maker. And, therefore, the gentian and the sky are always 
verily blue, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary ; and 
if you do not see them blue when you look at them, it is not 
their fault but yours. ^ 

3. Hence I would say to these philosophers : If, instead of 
using the sonorous phrase, " It is objectively so," you will use 
the plain old phrase, " It is so ; " and if instead of the sonorous 
phrase, " It is subjectively so," you will say, in plain old English, 
" It does so," or " It seems so to me ; " you will, on the whole, 
be more intelligible to your fellow-creatures : and besides, if you 
find that a thing which generally " does so " to other people (as 
a gentian looks blue to most men) does not so to you, on any 
particular occasion, you will not fall into the impertinence of 
saying that the thing is not so, or did not so, but you will say 

1 It is quite true, that in all qualities involving sensation, there may be a doubt 
whether different people receive the same sensation from the same thing (compare 
Part ii, Sec. i, Chap. v. ^ 6) ; but, though this makes such facts not distinctly ex- 
plicable, it does not alter the facts themselves. I derive a certain sensation, which 
I call sweetness, from sugar. That is a fact. Another person feels a sensation, 
which he also calls sweetness, from sugar. That is also a fact. The sugar's power 
to produce these two sensations, which we suppose to be, and which are, in all 
probability, very nearly the same in both of us, and, on the whole, in the human 
race, is its sweetness. 



3l6 THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

simply (what you will be all the better for speedily finding out) 
that something is the matter with you. If you find that you 
cannot explode the gunpowder, you will not declare that all gun- 
powder is subjective, and all explosion imaginary, but you will 
simply suspect and declare yourself to be an ill-made match. 
Which, on the whole, though there may be a distant chance of a 
mistake about it, is, nevertheless, the wisest conclusion you can 
come to until farther experiment.^ 

4. Now, therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words 
quite out of our way, we may go on at our ease to examine the 
point in question, — namely, the difference between the ordinary, 
proper, and true appearances of things to us ; and the extraor- 
dinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of 
emotion, or contemplative fancy;- false appearances, I say, as 
being entirely unconnected with any real power or character 
in the object, and only imputed to it by us. 

For instance — 

" The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould 
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold." ^ 

This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not 
a spendthrift, but a hardy plant ; its yellow is not gold, but 

1 In fact (for I may as well, for once, meet our German friends in their own 
style), all that has been subjected to us on this subject seems object to this great 
objection ; that the subjection of all things (subject to no exceptions) to senses 
which are, in us, both subject and abject, and objects of perpetual contempt, cannot 
but make it our ultimate object to subject ourselves to the senses, and to remove 
whatever objections existed to such subjection. So that, finally, that which is the 
subject of examination or object of attention, uniting thus in itself the characters of 
subness and obness (so that, that which has no obness in it should be called sub- 
subjective, or a sub-subject, and that which has no subness in it should be called 
upper or ober-objective, or an ob-object) ; and we also, who suppose ourselves the ob- 
jects of every arrangement, and are certainly the subjects of every sensual impression, 
thus uniting in ourselves, in an obverse or adverse manner, the characters of obness 
and subness, must both become metaphysically dejected or rejected, nothing re- 
maining in us objective, but subjectivity, and the very objectivity of the object 
being lost in the abyss of this subjectivity of the Human. 

There is, however, some meaning in the above sentence, if the reader cares to 
make it out ; but in a pure German sentence of the highest style there is often none 
whatever. See Appendix II, " German Philosophy." 

2 Contemplative, in the sense explained in Part iii. Sec. ii. Chap. iv. 

3 Holmes (Oliver Wendell), quoted by Miss Mitford in her Recollections of a 
Literary Life. 



JOHN RUSKIN 317 

saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into 
our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus ? 

It is an important question. For, throughout our past reason- 
ings about art, we have always found that nothing could be 
good or useful, or ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. 
But here is something pleasurable in written poetry which is 
nevertheless ?///true. And what is more, if we think over our 
favourite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and 
that we like it all the more for being so. 

5. It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that 
this fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of 
the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no 
real expectation that it will be believed ; or else it is a fallacy 
caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the 
time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we 
shall have to speak presently ; but, in this chapter, I want to 
examine the nature of the other error, that which the mind 
admits, when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, 
in Alton Locke, — 

" They rowed her in across the rolling foam — 
The cruel, crawling foam." 

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind 
which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one 
in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings 
have the same eifect. They produce in us a falseness in all our 
impressions of external things, which I would generally charac- 
terize as the " Pathetic Fallacy." 

6. Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as 
eminently a character of poetical description, and the temper of 
mind in which we allow it, as one eminently poetical, because 
passionate. But, I believe, if we look well into the matter, that 
we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of 
falseness, — that it is only the second order of poets who much 
delight in it.^ 

1 I admit two orders of poets, but no third ; and by these two orders I mean the 
Creative (Shakspere, Homer, Dante), and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, 
Keats, Tennyson). But both of these must beyfr^Z-rate in their range, though their 
range is different ; and with poetry second-rate in quality no one ought to be allowed 



3l8 THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank 
of Acheron " as dead leaves flutter from a bough," he gives the 
most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, 
passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, 
for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are 
souls, and those are leaves : he makes no confusion of one with 
the other. But when Coleridge speaks of 

" The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
That dances as often as dance it can," 

he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the 
leaf ; he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not ; con- 
fuses its powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merri- 
ment, and the wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, 
there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage ; but take an 
instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of 
Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has fallen from an 
upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left dead, 
unmissed by his leader, or companions, in the haste of their 
departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land ; and 
Ulysses summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which 
appears is that of the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in 
exactly the spirit of bitter and terrified lightness which is seen in 
Hamlet^ addresses the spirit with the simple, startled words : — 

to trouble mankind. There is quite enough of the best, — much more than we 
can ever read or enjoy in the length of a life ; and it is a literal wrong or sin in any 
person to encumber us with inferior work. I have no patience with apologies 
made by young pseudo-poets, " that they believe there is some good in what they 
have written ; that they hope to do better in time," etc. Sorne good ! If there is 
not all good, there is no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble 
us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done, and wait for the 
better days. There are few men, ordinarily educated, who in moments of strong 
feeling cquld not strike out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be 
presentable. But men of sense know better than to so waste their time; and those 
who sincerely love poetry, know the touch of the master's hand on the chords too 
well to fumble among them after him. Nay, more than this; all inferior poetry is 
an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away the freshness of rhymes, blunders 
upon and gives a wretched commonalty to good thoughts, and, in general, adds to 
the weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable manner. There are 
few thoughts likely to come across ordinary men, which have not already been 
expressed by greater men in the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, 
more noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than to invent 
poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the world. 
1 " Well said, old mole ! can'st work i' the ground so fast ? " 



JOHN RUSK IN 319 

"Elpenor! How earnest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast thou 
come faster on foot than I in my black ship? " 

Which Pope renders thus : — 

" O, say, what angry power Elpenor led 
To glide in shades, and wander with the dead? 
How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined, 
Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?" 

I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the 
nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind ! And yet 
how is it that these conceits are so painful now, when they have 
been pleasant to us in the other instances ? 

7. For a very simple reason. They are not a pathetic fallacy 
at all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion — a 
passion which never could possibly have spoken them — ago- 
nized curiosity. Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter ; 
and the very last thing his mind could do at the moment would 
be to pause, or suggest in any wise what was not a fact. The 
delay in the first three lines, and conceit in the last, jar upon us 
instantly, like the most frightful discord in music. No poet of 
true imaginative power could possibly have written the passage.^ 

Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in 
some sort, even in our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge's fal- 
lacy has no discord in it, but Pope's has set our teeth on edge. 
Without farther questioning, I will endeavour to state the main 
bearings of this matter. 

8. The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy is, as 
I said above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to 
deal fully with what is before them or upon them ; borne away, 

1 It is worth while comparing the way a similar question is put by the exquisite 
sincerity of Keats : — 

" He wept, and his bright tears 
Went trickling down the golden bow he held. 
Thus, with half-shut, suffused eyes, he stood ; 
While from beneath some cumb'rous boughs hard by, 
With solemn step, an awful goddess came. 
And there was purport in her looks for him, 
Which he with eager guess began to read : 
Perplexed the while, melodiously he said, 
' How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea f ' " 



320 THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion ; and it is a more 
or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which 
has induced it. For it is no credit to a man that he is not mor- 
bid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength 
of feeling to warp them ; and it is in general a sign of higher 
capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions 
should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and 
make it believe what they choose. But it is still a grander con- 
dition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to 
assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the 
passions ; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, 
perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating ; even if he 
melts, losing none of his weight. 

So, then, we have the three ranks : the man who perceives 
rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose 
is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. 
Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he 
feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a prim- 
rose : a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield, or a forsaken maiden. 
And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite 
of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing 
else than itself — a little flower, apprehended in the very plain 
and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associa- 
tions and passions may be, that crowd around it. And, in 
general, these three classes may be rated in comparative order, 
as the men who are not poets at all, and the poets of the second 
order, and the poets of the first ; only, however great a man 
may be, there are always some subjects which oicght to throw 
him ofiE his balance ; some, by which his poor human capacity 
of thought should be conquered, and brought into the inac- 
curate and vague state of perception, so that the language of 
the highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure, and wild in 
metaphor, resembling that of the weaker man, overborne by 
weaker things. 

g. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel 
nothing, and therefore see truly ; the men who feel strongly, 
think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets) ; the men 
who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of 



JOHN RUSK IN 321 

poets) ; and the men who, strong as human creatures can be, 
are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a 
sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. 
This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration. 

10. I separate these classes, in order that their character may 
be clearly understood ; but of course they are united each to the 
other by imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, accord- 
ing to the influences to which it is subjected, passes at different 
times into the various states. Still, the difference between the 
great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of alter- 
ability. That is to say, the one knows too much, and perceives 
and feels too much of the past and future, and of all things 
beside and around that which immediately affects him, to be in 
any wise shaken by it. His mind is made up ; his thoughts have 
an accustomed current ; his ways are stedfast ; it is not this or 
that new sight which will at once unbalance him. He is tender 
to impression at the surface, like a rock with deep moss upon it ; 
but there is too much mass of him to be moved. The smaller 
man, with the same degree of sensibility, is at once carried off 
his feet ; he wants to do something he did not want to do before ; 
he views all the universe in a new light through his tears ; he is 
gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come 
and go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be 
thought, to a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think 
Dante stern), receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having 
a great centre of reflection and knowledge in which he stands 
serene, and watches the feeling, as it were, from far off. 

Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of him- 
self, and can look around calmly, at all moments, for the image 
or the word that will best tell what he sees to the upper or lower 
world. But Keats and Tennyson, and the poets of the second 
order, are generally themselves subdued by the feelings under 
which they write, or, at least, write as choosing to be so, and 
therefore admit certain expressions and modes of thought which 
are in some sort diseased or false. 

11, Now so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, 
or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it 
induces : we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kings- 

Y 



322 THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

ley's, above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, 
but because they faithfully describe sorrow. But the moment 
the mind of the speaker becomes cold, that moment every such 
expression becomes untrue, as being for ever untrue in the external 
facts. And there is no greater baseness in literature than the 
habit of using these metaphorical expressions in cool blood. An 
inspired writer, in full impetuosity of passion, may speak wisely 
and truly of " raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own 
shame " ; but it is only the basest writer who cannot speak of 
the sea without talking of " raging waves," " remorseless floods," 
" ravenous billows," etc. ; and it is one of the signs of the 
highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, 
and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact, out of which 
if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a 
true one. 

To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents a man 
in despair, desiring that his body may be cast into the sea, 

"Whose changing 7nonnd, and foam that passed aivay. 
Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay." 

Observe, there is not a single false or even overcharged expres- 
sion. " Mound " of the sea-wave is perfectly simple and true ; 
" changing " is as familiar as may be ; " foam that passed away," 
strictly literal ; and the whole line descriptive of the reality with 
a degree of accuracy which I know not any other verse, in the 
range of poetry, that altogether equals. For most people have 
not a distinct idea of the clumsiness and massiveness of a large 
wave. The word " wave " is used too generally of ripples and 
breakers, and bendings in light drapery or grass : it does not by 
itself convey a perfect image. But the word " mound " is heavy, 
large, dark, definite ; there is no mistaking the kind of wave 
meant, "nor missing the sight of it. Then the term " changing " 
has a peculiar force also. Most people think of waves as rising 
and falling. But if they look at the sea carefully, they will per- 
ceive that the waves do not rise and fall. They change. Change 
both place and form, but they do not "fall ; one wave goes on, 
and on, and still on ; now lower, now higher, now tossing its 
mane like a horse, now building itself together like a wall, now 



JOHN RUSK IN 323 

shaking, now steady, but still the same wave, till at last it seems 
struck by something, and changes, one knows not how, — becomes 
another wave. 

The close of the line insists on this image, and paints it still 
more perfectly, — " foam that passed away." Not merely melt- 
fng, disappearing, but passing on, out of sight, on the career of 
the wave. Then, having put the absolute ocean fact as far as 
he may before our eyes, the poet leaves us to feel abput it as we 
may, and to trace for ourselves the opposite fact, — the image of 
the green mounds that do not change, and the white and written 
stones that do not pass away ; and thence to follow out also the 
associated images of the calm life with the quiet grave, and the 
despairing life with the fading foam : — 

" Let no man move his bones." 

" As for Samaria, her king is cut off like the foam upon the water." 

But nothing of this is actually told or pointed out, and the 
expressions, as they stand, are perfectly severe and accurate, 
utterly uninfluenced by the firmly governed emotion of the writer. 
Even the word " mock " is hardly an exception, as it may stand 
merely for " deceive " or "defeat," without implying any imper- 
sonation of the waves. 

12. It may be well, perhaps, to give one or two more instances 
to show the peculiar dignity possessed by all passages which 
thus limit their expression to the pure fact, and leave the hearer 
to gather what he can from it. Here is a notable one from the 
Iliad. Helen, looking from the Scaean gate of Troy over the 
Grecian host, and telling Priam the names of its captains, says 
at last : — 

" I see all the other dark-eyed Greeks; but two I cannot see, — Castor and 
Pollux, — whom one mother bore with me. Have they not followed from fair 
Laced^mon, or have they indeed come in their sea-wandering ships, but now 
will not enter into the battle of men, fearing the shame and the scorn that is 
in Me?" 

Then Homer : — 

" So she spoke. But them, already, the life-giving earth possessed, there 
in Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland." 



324 THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

Note, here, the high poetical truth carried to the extreme. 
The poet has to speak of the earth in sadness, but he will 
not let that sadness affect or change his thoughts of it. No ; 
though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother 
still, fruitful, life-giving. These are the facts of the thing. I 
see nothing else than these. Make what you will of them. 

13. Take another very notable instance from Casimir de la 
Vigne's terrible ballad, "La Toilette de Constance." I must 
quote a few lines out of it here and there, to enable the reader 
who has not the book by him, to understand its close. 

" Vite, Anna, vite ; au miroir 

rius vite, Anna. L'heure s'avance, 
Et je vais au bal ce soir 

Chez I'ambassadeur de France. 

Y pensez-vous, ils sont fanes, ces noeuds, 

lis sont d'hier; mon Dieu, comme tout passe! 
Que du reseau qui retient mes cheveux 

Les glands d'azur retombent avec grace. 
Plus haut ! Plus bas ! Vous ne comprenez rien ! 

Que sur mon front ce saphir etincelle : 
Vous me piquez, maladroite. Ah, c'est bien, 

Bien, — chere Anna ! Je t'aime, je suis belle. ' 

Celui qu'en vain je voudrais oublier 

(Anna, ma robe) il y sera, j'espere. 
(Ah, fi ! profane, est-ce la mon collier? 

Quoi ! ces grains d'or benits par le Saint-Pere ! ) 
II y sera ; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main, 

En y pensant, k peine je respire : 
Pere Anselmo doit m'entendre demain, 

Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire? 

Vite un coup d'oeil au miroir, 

Le dernier. — J'ai I'assurance 
Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir 

Chez I'ambassadeur de France. 

Pres du foyer, Constance s'admirait. 

Dieu ! sur sa robe il vole une etincelle ! 
Au feu ! Courez ! Quand I'espoir I'enivrait 

Tout perdre ainsi ! Quoi ! Mourir, — et si belle ! 



JOHN RUSK IN 325 

L'horrible feu ronge avec volupte 

Ses bras, son sein, et I'entoure, et s'eleve, 

Et sans pitie devore sa beaute,. 

Ses dixhuit ans, helas, et son doux reve ! 

Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour ! 

On disait, Pauvre Constance ! 
Et I'on dansait, jusqu'au jour, 

Chez I'ambassadeur de France." 

Yes, that is the fact of it. Right or wrong, the poet does not 
say. What you may think about it, he does not know. He has 
nothing to do with that. There He the ashes of the dead girl 
in her chamber. There they danced, till the morning, at the 
Ambassador's of France. Make what you will of it. 

If the reader will look through the ballad, of which I have 
quoted only about the third part, he will find that there is not, 
from beginning to end of it, a single poetical (so called) expres- 
sion, except in one stanza. The girl speaks as simple prose as 
may be ; there is not a word she would not have actually used 
as she was dressing. The poet stands by, impassive as a statue, 
recording her words just as they come. At last the doom seizes 
her, and in the very presence of death, for an instant, his own 
emotions conquer him. He records no longer the facts only, 
but the facts as they seem to him. The fire gnaws 7vith volup- 
tuousness — ivithout pity. It is soon past. The fate is fixed 
for ever ; and he retires into his pale and crystalline atmosphere 
of truth. He closes all with the calm veracity, 

" They said, ' Poor Constance ! ' " 

14, Now in this there is the exact type of the consummate 
poetical temperament. For, be it clearly and constantly remem- 
bered, that the greatness of a poet depends upon the two facul- 
ties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it. A poet is great, 
first in proportion to the strength of his passion, and then, that 
strength being granted, in proportion to his government of it; 
there being, however, always a point beyond which it would be 
inhuman and monstrous if he pushed this government, and, 
therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild fancy becomes 



326 THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

just and true. Thus the destruction of the kingdom of Assyria 
cannot be contemplated firmly by a prophet of Israel. The fact 
is too great, too wonderful. It overthrows him, dashes him into 
a confused element of dreams. All the world is, to his stunned 
thought, full of strange voices. " Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at 
thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, ' Since thou art gone 
down to the grave, no feller is come up against us.' " So, still 
more, the thought of the presence of Deity cannot be borne 
without this great astonishment. " The mountains and the hills 
shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the 
field shall clap their hands." 

15. But by how much this feeling is noble when it is justified 
by the strength of its cause, by so much it is ignoble when there 
is not cause enough for it ; and beyond all other ignobleness is 
the mere affectation of it, in hardness of heart. Simply bad 
writing may almost always, as above noticed, be known by its 
adoption of these fanciful metaphorical expressions, as a sort of 
current coin ; yet there is even a worse, at least a more harmful, 
condition of writing than this, in which such expressions are not 
ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up, but, by some master, 
skilful in handling, yet insincere, deliberately wrought out with 
chill and studied fancy ; as if we should tiy to make an old lava 
stream look red-hot again, by covering it with dead leaves, or 
white-hot, with hoar frost. 

When Young is lost in veneration, as he dwells on the char- 
acter of a truly good and holy man, he permits himself for a 
moment to be overborne by the feeling so far as to exclaim — 

" Where shall I find him ? angels, tell me where. 
You know him; he is near you; point him out. 
Shall I see glories beaming from his brow, 
Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers? " 

This emotion has a worthy cause, and is thus true and right. 
But now hear the cold-hearted Pope say to a shepherd girl : — 

" Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade ! 
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade; 
Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove, 
And winds shall waft it to the powers above. 



JOHN RUSKIN 327 

But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain, 
The wondering forests soon should dance again; 
The moving mountains hear the powerful call. 
And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall." 

This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the 
language of passion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypoc- 
risy ; definite absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly asserted 
in the teeth of nature and fact. Passion will indeed go far in 
deceiving itself; but it must be a strong passion, not the simple 
wish of a lover to tempt his mistress to sing. Compare a very 
closely parallel passage in Wordsworth, in which the lover has 
lost his mistress : — 

"Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid, 
When thus his moan he made : — 

'Oh, move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak, 

Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie, 
That in some other way yon smoke 

May mount into the sky. 
If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough, 

Headlong, the waterfall must come. 

Oh, let it, then, be dumb — 
Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.' " 

Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a water- 
fall to be silent, if it is not to hang listening : but with what dif- 
ferent relation to the mind that contemplates them ! Here, in 
the extremity of its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, 
which at the same moment it partly knows to be impossible, but 
partly believes possible, in a vague impression that a miracle 
might be wrought to give relief even to a less sore distress, — 
that nature is kind, and God is kind, and that grief is strong : 
it knows not well what is possible to such grief. To silence a 
stream, to move a cottage wall, — one might think it could do 
as much as that ! 

16. I believe these instances are enough to illustrate the main 
point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy, — that so far 
as it is a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind, 
and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most inspired 



328 THE PATHETIC FALLACY 

prophet it is a sign of the incapacity of his human sight or 
thought to bear what has been revealed to it. In ordinary 
poetry, if it is found in the thoughts of the poet himself, it is at 
once a sign of his belonging to the inferior school ; if in the 
thoughts of the characters imagined by him, it is right or wrong 
according to the genuineness of the emotion from which it springs ; 
always, however, implying necessarily sotfie degree of weakness 
in the character. 

Take two most exquisite instances from master hands. The 
Jessy of Shenstone, and the Ellen of Wordsworth, have both 
been betrayed and deserted. Jessy, in the course of her most 
touching complaint, says : — 

" If through the garden's flowery tribes I stray, 

Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure, 
' Hope not to find delight in us,' they say, 
' For we are spotless, Jessy, we are pure.' " 

Compare with this some of the words of Ellen : — 

"'Ah, why,' said Ellen, sighing to herself, 
' Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge, 
And nature, that is kind in woman's breast. 
And reason, that in man is wise and good. 
And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge, — 
Why do not these prevail for human life, 
To keep two hearts together, that began 
Their springtime with one love, and that have need 
Of mutual pity and forgiveness, sweet 
To grant, or be received; while that poor bird — 
O, come and hear him ! Thou who hast to me 
Been faithless, hear him; — though a lowly creature, 
One of God's simple children, that yet know not 
The Universal Parent, hoiv he sings ! 
As if he wished the firmament of heaven 
Should listen, and give back to him the voice 
Of his triumphant constancy and love. 
The proclamation that he makes, how far 
His darkness doth transcend our fickle light.' " 

The perfection of both these passages, as far as regards truth 
and tenderness of imagination in the two poets, is quite insu- 



JOHN RUSK IN 329 

perable. But, of the two characters imagined, Jessy is weaker 
than Ellen, exactly in so far as something appears to her to be 
in nature which is not. The flowers do not really reproach her. 
God meant them to comfort her, not to taunt her ; they would 
do so if she saw them rightly. 

Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the slightest erring 
emotion. There is not the barest film of fallacy in all her 
thoughts. She reasons as calmly as if she did not feel. And, 
although the singing of the bird suggests to her the idea of its 
desiring to be heard in heaven, she does not for an instant admit 
any veracity in the thought. "As if," she says, — " I know he 
means nothing of the kind ; but it does verily seem as if." The 
reader wall find, by examining the rest of the poem, that Ellen's 
character is throughout consistent in this clear though passionate 
strength.^ 

It then being, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all re- 
spects that the pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is 
pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the 
dominion of Truth is entire, over this, as over every other natu- 
ral and just state of the human mind, we may go on to the sub- 
ject for the dealing with which this prefatory inquiry became 
necessary ; and why necessary, we shall see forthwith. 



1 I cannot quit this subject without giving two more instances, both exquisite, of 
the pathetic fallacy, which I have just come upon, in Maude : — 

" For a great speculation had fail'd ; 
And ever he mutter'd and madden'd, and ever wann'd with despair; 
And out he walk'd, when the wind like a broken worldling wail'd, 
And ^h&flyi7ig gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove thro' the air." 

" There has fallen a splendid tear 

From the passion-flower at the gate. 
The red rose cries, ' She is near, she is near !' 

And the white rose weeps, ' She is late.' 
The larkspur listens, ' I hear, 1 hear ! ' 
And the lily whispers, ' 1 wait.' " 



330 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

KNOWLEDGE VIEWED IN RELATION 
TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
[Discourse vii in The Idea of a University defined and illustrated, 1854.] 



I HAVE been insisting, in my two preceding Discourses, first, on 
the cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be 
pursued for its own sake ; and next, on the nature of that cultiva- 
tion, or what that cultivation consists in. Truth of whatever kind 
is the proper object of the intellect ; its cultivation then lies in 
fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth. Now the intellect in 
its present state, with exceptions which need not here be specified, 
does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not 
by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by 
piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round 
an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correc- 
tion, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the 
employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and 
exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual 
powers, such an enlargement and development, such a compre- 
hensiveness, is necessarily a matter of training. And again, such a 
training is a matter of rule ; it is not mere application, however 
exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor the reading 
many books, nor the getting up many subjects, nor the witnessing 
many experiments, nor the attending many lectures. All this is 
short of enough ; a man may have done it all, yet be lingering in 
the vestibule of knowledge : — he may not realize what his mouth 
utters ; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him ; 
he may have no grasp of things as they are ; or at least he may 
have no power at all of advancing one step forward of himself, in 
consequence of what he has already acquired, no power of dis- 
criminating between truth and falsehood, of sifting out the grains 
of truth from the mass, of arranging things according to their real 
value, and, if I may use the phrase, of building up ideas. Such a 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 33 1 

power is the result of a scientific formation of mind ; it is an 
acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, 
of wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind, and of intellectual self- 
possession and repose, — qualities which do not come of mere 
acquirement. The bodily eye, the organ for apprehending mate- 
rial objects, is provided by nature ; the eye of the mind, of which 
the object is truth, is the work of discipline and habit. 

This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being 
formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, 
some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disci- 
plined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper 
object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Educa- 
tion ; and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is 
conceivable, or whose intellect would be a pattern of what intel- 
lects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one but may gain 
an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards it, and 
make its true scope and result, not something else, his standard 
of excellence ; and numbers there are who may submit themselves 
to it, and secure it to themselves in good measure. And to set 
forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help 
forward all students towards it according to their various capaci- 
ties, this I conceive to be the business of a University. 



Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow ; they 
insist that Education should be confined to some particular and 
narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be 
weighed and measured. They argue as if every thing, as well as 
every person, had its price ; and that where there has been a great 
outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they 
call making Education and Instruction "useful," and " UtiUty " 
becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this 
nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for 
the expense of a University ; what is the real worth in the market 
of the article called " a Liberal Education," on the supposition 
that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manu- 
factures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy ; 
or again, if it does not at once make this man a lawyer, that an 



332 KNOWLEDGE IN H ELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

engineer, and that a surgeon ; or at least if it does not lead to 
discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and 
science of every kind. 

This question, as might have been expected, has been keenly 
debated in the present age, and formed one main subject of the 
controversy, to which I referred in the Introduction to the present 
Discourses, as having been sustained in the first decade of this 
century by a celebrated Northern Review on the one hand, and 
defenders of the University of Oxford on the other. Hardly had 
the authorities of that ancient seat of learning, waking from their 
long neglect, set on foot a plan for the education of the youth 
committed to them, than the representatives of science and litera- 
ture in the city, which has sometimes been called the Northern 
Athens, remonstrated, with their gravest arguments and their most 
brilliant satire, against the direction and shape which the reform 
was taking. Nothing would content them, but that the University 
should be set to rights on the basis of the philosophy of Utility ; a 
philosophy, as they seem to have thought, which needed but to be 
proclaimed in order to be embraced. In truth, they were little 
aware of the depth and force of the principles on which the 
academical authorities were proceeding, and, this being so, it 
was not to be expected that they would be allowed to walk 
at leisure over the field of controversy which they had selected. 
Accordingly they were encountered in behalf of the University by 
two men of great name and influence in their day, of very different 
minds, but united, as by Collegiate ties, so in the clear-sighted 
and large view which they took of the whole subject of Liberal 
Education ; and the defence thus provided for the Oxford studies 
has kept its ground to this day. 

3 

Let me be allowed to devote a few words to the memory of dis- 
tinguished persons, under the shadow of whose name I once lived, 
and by whose doctrine I am now profiting. In the heart of Oxford 
there is a small plot of ground, hemmed in by public thorough- 
fares, which has been the possession and the home of one Society 
for about five hundred years. In the old time of Boniface the 
Eighth and John the Twenty-second, in the age of Scotus and 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 333 

Occam and Dante, before Wiclif or Huss had kindled those 
miserable fires which are still raging to the ruin of the highest 
interests of man, an unfortunate king of England, Edward the 
Second, flying from the field of Bannockburn, is said to have 
made a vow to the Blessed Virgin to found a religious house in 
her honour, if he got back in safety. Prompted and aided by his 
Almoner, he decided on placing this house in the city of Alfred ; 
and the Image of our Lady, which is opposite its entrance-gate, 
is to this day the token of the vow and its fulfilment. King and 
Almoner have long been in the dust, and strangers have entered 
into their inheritance, and their creed has been forgotten, and 
their holy rites disowned ; but day by day a memento is still made 
in the holy Sacrifice by at least one Catholic Priest, once a member 
of that College, for the souls of those Catholic benefactors who 
fed him there for so many years. The visitor, whose curiosity 
has been excited by its present fame, gazes perhaps with some- 
thing of disappointment on a collection of buildings which have 
with them so few of the circumstances of dignity or wealth. 
Broad quadrangles, high halls and chambers, ornamented cloisters, 
stately walks, or umbrageous gardens, a throng of students, ample 
revenues, or a glorious history, none of these things were the 
portion of that old Catholic foundation ; nothing in short which 
to the common eye sixty years ago would have given tokens of 
what it was to be. But it had at that time a spirit working within 
it, which enabled its inmates to do, amid its seeming insignifi- 
cance, what no other body in the place could equal ; not a very 
abstruse gift or extraordinary boast, but a rare one, the honest 
purpose to administer the trust committed to them in such a way 
as their conscience pointed out as best. So, whereas the Colleges 
of Oxford are self-electing bodies, the fellows in each perpetually 
filling up for themselves the vacancies which occur in their 
number, the members of this foundation determined, at a time 
when, either from evil custom or from ancient statute, such a 
thing was not known elsewhere, to throw open their fellowships 
to the competition of all comers, and, in the choice of associates 
henceforth, to cast to the winds every personal motive and feel- 
ing, family connexion, and friendship, and patronage, and political 
interest, and local claim, and prejudice, and party jealousy, and 



334 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

to elect solely on public and patriotic grounds. Nay, with a 
remarkable independence of mind, they resolved that even the 
table of honours, awarded to literary merit by the University in its 
new system of examination for degrees, should not fetter their 
judgment as electors ; but that at all risks, and whatever criticism 
it might cause, and whatever odium they might incur, they would 
select the men, whoever they were, to be children of their Founder, 
whom they thought in their consciences to be most likely from 
their intellectual and moral qualities to please him, if (as they 
expressed it) he were still upon earth, most likely to do honour 
to his College, most likely to promote the objects which they 
believed he had at heart. Such persons did not promise to be 
the disciples of a low Utilitarianism ; and consequently, as their 
collegiate reform synchronized with that reform of the Academical 
body, in which they bore a principal part, it was not unnatural 
that, when the storm broke upon the University from the North, 
their Alma Mater, whom they loved, should have found her first 
defenders within the walls of that small College, which had first 
put itself into a condition to be her champion. 

These defenders, I have said, were two, of whom the more dis- 
tinguished was the late Dr. Copleston, then a Fellow of the Col- 
lege, successively its Provost, and Protestant Bishop of Llandaff. 
In that Society, which owes so much to him, his name lives, and 
ever will live, for the distinction which his talents bestowed on it, 
for the academical importance to which he raised it, for the gen- 
erosity of spirit, the liberality of sentiment, and the kindness of 
heart, with which he adorned it, and which even those who had 
least sympathy with some aspects of his mind and character could 
not but admire and love. Men come to their meridian at various 
periods of their lives ; the last years of the eminent person I am 
speaking of were given to duties which, I am told, have been the 
means' of endearing him to numbers, but which afforded no scope 
for that pecuUar vigour and keenness of mind which enabled him, 
when a young man, single-handed, with easy gallantry, to en- 
counter and overthrow the charge of three giants of the North 
combined against him. I believe I am right in saying that, in the 
progress of the controversy, the most scientific, the most critical, 
and the most witty, of that literary company, all of them now, as 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 335 

he himself, removed from this visible scene, Professor Playfair, 
Lord Jeffrey, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, threw together their 
several efforts into one article of their Review, in order to crush 
and pound to dust the audacious controvertist who had come out 
against them in defence of his own Institutions. To have even 
contended with such men was a sufficient voucher for his ability, 
even before we open his pamphlets, and have actual evidence of 
the good sense, the spirit, the scholar-like taste, and the purity 
of style, by which they are distinguished. 

He was supported in the controversy, on the same general 
principles, but with more of method and distinctness, and, I will 
add, with greater force and beauty and perfection, both of thought 
and of language, by the other distinguished writer, to whom I 
have already referred, Mr. Davison ; who, though not so well 
known to the world in his day, has left more behind him than the 
Provost of Oriel, to make his name remembered by posterity. 
This thoughtful man, who was the admired and intimate friend 
of a very remarkable person, whom, whether he wish it or not, 
numbers revere and love as the first author of the subsequent 
movement in the Protestant Church towards Catholicism,^ this 
grave and philosophical writer, whose works I can never look into 
without sighing that such a man was lost to the Catholic Church, 
as Dr. Butler before him, by some early bias or some fault of self- 
education — he, in a review of a work by Mr. Edgeworth on Pro- 
fessional Education, which attracted a good deal of attention in 
its day, goes leisurely over the same ground, which had already 
been rapidly traversed by Dr. Copleston, and, though professedly 
employed upon Mr. Edgeworth, is really replying to the northern 
critic who had brought that writer's work into notice, and to a far 
greater author than either of them, who in a past age had argued 
on the same side. 

4 

The author to whom I allude is no other than Locke. That 
celebrated philosopher has preceded the Edinburgh Reviewers 
in condemning the ordinary subjects in which boys are instructed 

1 Mr. Keble, Vicar of Hursley, late Fellow of Oriel, and Professor of Poetry in 
the University of Oxford. 



336 KNO W LEDGE IN RE LA TION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

in school, on the ground that they are not needed by them in 
after life ; and before quoting what his disciples have said in the 
present century, I will refer to a few passages of the master. 
" 'Tis matter of astonishment," he says in his work on Education, 
" that men of quality and parts should suffer themselves to be so 
far misled by custom and implicit faith. Reason, if consulted 
with, would advise, that their children's time should be spent in 
acquiring what might be useful to them, when they come to be 
men, rather than that their heads should be stuffed with a deal 
of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do ('tis certain 
they never need to) think on again as long as they live ; and so 
much of it as does stick by them they are only the worse for." 

And so again, speaking of verse-making, he says, " I know not 
what reason a father can have to wish his son a poet, who does 
not desire him to bid defiance to all other- callings and busi- 
ness ; which is not yet the worst of the case ; for, if he proves a 
successful rhymer, and gets once the reputation of a wit, I desire 
it to be considered, what company and places he is likely to 
spend his time in, nay, and estate too ; for it is very seldom seen 
that any one discovers mines of gold or silver in Parnassus. 'Tis 
a pleasant air, but a barren soil." 

In another passage he distinctly limits utility in education to 
its bearing on the future profession or trade of the pupil, that is, 
he scorns the idea of any education of the intellect, simply as 
such. " Can there be any thing more ridiculous," he asks, " than 
that a father should waste his own money, and his son's time, in 
setting him to learn the Roman language, when at the same time 
he designs him for a trade, wherein he, having no use of Latin, 
fails not to forget that little which he brought from school, and 
which 'tis ten to one he abhors for the ill-usage it procured him? 
Could it be believed, unless we have every where amongst us 
examples of it, that a child should be forced to learn the rudi- 
ments of a language, which he is never to 7ise in the course of life 
that he is designed to, and neglect all the while the writing a good 
hand, and casting accounts, which are of great advantage in all 
conditions of life, and to most trades indispensably necessary?" 
Nothing of course can be more absurd than to neglect in educa- 
tion those matters which are necessary for a boy's future calling; 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 337 

but the tone of Locke's remarks evidently implies more than this, 
and is condemnatory of any teaching which tends to the general 
cultivation of the mind. 

Now to turn to his modern disciples. The study of the 
Classics had been made the basis of the Oxford education, in the 
reforms which I have spoken of, and the Edinburgh Reviewers 
protested, after the manner of Locke, that no good could come 
of a system which was not based upon the principle of Utihty. 

" Classical Literature," they said, " is the great object at Oxford. 
Many minds, so employed, have produced many works and much 
fame in that department ; but if all liberal arts and sciences, use- 
ful to human life, had been taught there, if some had dedicated 
themselves to chemistry, some to matheinatics, some to experimen- 
tal philosophy, and if every attainment had been honoured in the 
mixt ratio of its difficulty and utility, the system of such a Univer- 
sity would have been much more valuable, but the splendour of 
its name something less." 

LTtility may be made the end of education, in two respects : 
either as regards the individual educated, or the community at 
large. In which light do these writers regard it? in the latter. 
So far they differ from Locke, for they consider the advancement 
of science as the supreme and real end of a University. This is 
brought into view in the sentences which follow. 

" When a University has been doing useless things for a long 
time, it appears at first degrading to them to be useful. A set of 
Lectures on PoHtical Economy would be discouraged in Oxford, 
probably despised, probably not permitted. To discuss the in- 
closure of commons, and to dwell upon imports and exports, to 
come so near to common life, would seem to be undignified and 
contemptible. In the same manner, the Parr or the Bentley of 
the day would be scandalized, in a University, to be put on a 
level with the discoverer of a neutral salt ; and yet, what other 
measure is there of dignity in intellectual labour but usefulness ? 
And what ought the term University to mean, but a place where 
every science is taught which is liberal, and at the same time use- 
ful to mankind? Nothing would so much tend to bring classical 
literature within proper bounds as a steady and invariable appeal 
to utility in our appreciation of all human knowledge. . . . Look- 
z 



338 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

ing always to real utility as our guide, we should see, with equal 
pleasure, a studious and inquisitive mind arranging the productions 
of nature, investigating the qualities of bodies, or mastering' the 
difficulties of the learned languages. We should not care whether 
he was chemist, naturalist, or scholar, because we know it to be as 
necessary that matter should be studied and subdued to the use of 
man, as that taste should be gratified, and imagination inflamed." 

Such then is the enunciation, as far as words go, of the theory 
of Utility in Education ; and both on its own account, and for the 
sake of the able men who have advocated it, it has a claim on the at- 
tention of those whose principles I am here representing. Certainly 
it is specious to contend that nothing is worth pursuing but what 
is useful ; and that hfe is not long enough to expend upon inter- 
esting, or curious, or brilliant trifles. Nay, in one sense, I will 
grant it is more than specious, it is true ; but, if so, how do I propose 
directly to meet the objection? Why, Gentlemen, I have really 
met it already, viz., in laying down, that intellectual culture is 
its own end ; for what has its end in itself, has its use in it- 
self also. I say, if a Liberal Education consists in the culture of 
the intellect, and if that culture be in itself a good, here, without 
going further, is an answer to Locke's question; for if a healthy 
body is a good in itself, why is not a healthy intellect? and if a 
College of Physicians is a useful institution, because it contem- 
plates bodily health, why is not an Academical Body, though it 
were simply and solely engaged in imparting vigour and beauty 
and grasp to the intellectual portion of our nature ? And the 
Reviewers I am quoting seem to allow this in their better moments, 
in a passage which, putting aside the question of its justice in fact, 
is sound and true in the principles to which it appeals : — 

" The present state of classical education," they say, " cultivates 
the imagination a great deal too much, and other habits of mind 
a great^deal too little, and trains up many young men in a style 
of elegant imbecility, utterly unworthy of the talents with which 
nature has endowed them. . . . The matter of fact is, that a 
classical scholar of twenty-three or twenty-four is a man princi- 
pally conversant with works of imagination. His feelings are 
quick, his fancy lively, and his taste good. Talents for specula- 
tion and original inquiry he has none, nor has he formed the 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 339 

invaluable habit of pushing things up to their first principles, or of 
collecting dry and unamusing facts as the materials for reasoning. 
All the solid and masculine parts of his understa?iding are left 
wholly without cultivation ; he hates the pain of thinking, and 
suspects every man whose boldness and originality call upon him 
to defend his opinions and prove his assertions." 

5 

Now, I am not at present concerned with the specific question 
of classical education ; else, I might reasonably question the justice 
of calling an intellectual discipline, which embraces the study of 
Aristotle, Thucydides, and Tacitus, which involves Scholarship and 
Antiquities, imaginative ; still so far I readily grant, that the culti- 
vation of the " understanding," of a " talent for speculation and 
original inquiry," and of " the habit of pushing things up to their 
first principles," is a principal portion of a good ox //(^(fr*^/ educa- 
tion. If then the Reviewers consider such cultivation the char- 
acteristic of a useful education, as they seem to do in the foregoing 
passage, it follows, that what they mean by " useful " is just what 
I mean by " good " or " liberal " : and Locke's question becomes 
a verbal one. Whether youths are to be taught Latin or verse- 
making will depend on the fact, whether these studies tend to 
mental culture ; but, however this is determined, so far is clear, 
that in that mental culture consists what I have called a liberal or 
non-professional, and what the Reviewers call a useful education. 

This is the obvious answer which may be made to those who 
urge upon us the claims of UtiHty in our plans of Education ; but 
I am not going to leave the subject here : I mean to take a wider 
view of it. Let us take " useful," as Locke takes it, in its proper 
and popular sense, and then we enter upon a large field of thought, 
to which I cannot do justice in one Discourse, though to-day's is 
all the space that I can give to it. I say, let us take " useful " to 
mean, not what is simply good, but what tends to good, or is the 
instrument of good ; and in this sense also, Gentlemen, I will 
show you how a liberal education is truly and fully a useful, 
though it be not a professional, education. " Good " indeed 
means one thing, and " useful " means another ; but I lay it down 
as a principle, which will save us a great deal of anxiety, that, 



340 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

though the useful is not always good, the good is always useful. 
Good is not only good, but reproductive of good ; this is one of 
its attributes ; nothing is excellent, beautiful, perfect, desirable for 
its own sake, but it overflows, and spreads the likeness of itself 
all around it. Good is prolific ; it is not only good to the eye, 
but to the taste ; it not only attracts us, but it communicates 
itself; it excites first our admiration and love, then our desire 
and our gratitude, and that, in proportion to its intenseness and 
fulness in particular instances. A great good will impart great 
good. If then the intellect is so excellent a portion of us, and 
its cultivation so excellent, it is not only beautiful, perfect, ad- 
mirable, and noble in itself, but in a true and high sense it must 
be useful to the possessor and to all around him ; not useful in 
any low, mechanical, mercantile sense, but as diffusing good, or 
as a blessing, or a gift, or power, or a treasure, first to the owner, 
then through him to the world. I say then, if a liberal education 
be good, it must necessarily be useful too. 



You will see what I mean by the parallel of bodily health. 
Health is a good in itself, though nothing came of it, and is es- 
pecially worth seeking and cherishing ; yet, after all, the blessings 
which attend its presence are so great, while they are so close to 
it and so redound back upon it and encircle it, that we never 
think of it except as useful as well as good, and praise and prize 
it for what it does, as well as for what it is, though at the same 
time we cannot point out any definite and distinct work or pro- 
duction which it can be said to effect. And so as regards intel- 
lectual culture, I am far from denying utility in this large sense as 
the end of Education, when I lay it down, that the culture of the 
intellect is a good in itself and its own end ; I do not exclude 
from the idea of intellectual culture what it cannot but be, from 
the very nature of things ; I only deny that we must be able to 
point out, before we have any right to call it useful, some art, or 
business, or profession, or trade, or work, as resulting from it, and 
as its real and complete end. The parallel is exact: — As the 
body may be sacrificed to some manual or other toil, whether 
moderate or oppressive, so may the intellect be devoted to some 



JOHN HENR V NE WMAN 34 1 

specific profession ; and I do not call this the culture of the 
intellect. Again, as some member or organ of the body may be 
inordinately used and developed, so may memory, or imagination, 
or the reasoning faculty ; and this again is not intellectual culture. 
On the other hand, as the body may be tended, cherished, and 
exercised with a simple view to its general health, so may the 
intellect also be generally exercised in order to its perfect state ; 
and this is its cultivation. 

Again, as health ought to precede labour of the body, and as a 
man in health can do what an unhealthy man cannot do, and as 
of this health the properties are strength, energy, agility, graceful 
carriage and action, manual dexterity, and endurance of fatigue, 
so in hke manner general culture of mind is the best aid to pro- 
fessional and scientific study, and educated men can do what 
ilhterate cannot ; and the man who has learned to think and to 
reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who 
has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his 
mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, 
or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, 
or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or 
a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state 
of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or 
callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste 
or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, 
to which another is a stranger. In this sense then, and as yet I 
have said but a very few words on a large subject, mental culture 
is emphatically useful. 

If then I am arguing, and shall argue, against Professional or 
Scientific knowledge as the sufficient end of a University Edu- 
cation, let me not be supposed. Gentlemen, to be disrespectful 
towards particular studies, or arts, or vocations, and those who 
are engaged in them. In saying that Law or Medicine is not the 
end of a University course, I do not mean to imply that the Uni- 
versity does not teach Law or Medicine. What indeed can it 
teach at all, if it does not teach something particular? It teaches 
all knowledge by teaching all branches of knowledge, and in no 
other way. I do but say that there will be this distinction as 
regards a Professor of Law, or of Medicine, or of Geology, or of 



342 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

Political Economy, in a University and out of it, that out of a 
University he is in danger of being absorbed and narrowed by his 
pursuit, and of giving Lectures which are the Lectures of nothing 
more than a lawyer, physician, geologist, or political economist ; 
whereas in a University he will just know where he and his science 
stand, he has come to it, as it were, from a height, he has taken 
a survey of all knowledge, he is kept from extravagance by the 
very rivalry of other studies, he has gained from them a special 
illumination and largeness of mind and freedom and self-possession, 
and he treats his own in consequence with a philosophy and a 
resource, which belongs not to the study itself, but to his liberal 
education. 

This then is how I should solve the fallacy, for so I must call it, 
by which Locke and his disciples would frighten us from culti- 
vating the intellect, under the notion that no education is useful 
which does not teach us some temporal calling, or some mechani- 
cal art, or some physical secret. I say that a cultivated intellect, 
because it is a good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace to 
every work and occupation which it undertakes, and enables us to 
be more useful, and to a greater number. There is a duty we 
owe to human society as such, to the state to which we belong, to 
the sphere in which we move, to the individuals towards whom we 
are variously related, and whom we successively encounter in life ; 
and that philosophical or liberal education, as I have called it, 
which is the proper function of a University, if it refuses the fore- 
most place to professional interests, does but postpone them to 
the formation of the citizen, and, while it subserves the larger 
interests of philanthropy, prepares also for the successful prosecu- 
tion of those merely personal objects, which at first sight it seems 
to disparage. 

7 

And now. Gentlemen, I wish to be allowed to enforce in detail 
what I have been saying, by some extracts from the writings 
to which I have already alluded, and to which I am so greatly 
indebted. 

" It is an undisputed maxim in Political Economy," says Dr. 
Copleston, " that the separation of professions and the division of 
labour tend to the perfection of every art, to the wealth of nations, 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 343 

to the general comfort and well-being of the community. This 
principle of division is in some instances pursued so far as to 
excite the wonder of people to whose notice it is for the first time 
pointed out. There is no saying to what extent it may not be 
carried ; and the more the powers of each individual are concen- 
trated in one employment, the greater skill and quickness will he 
naturally display in performing it. But, while he thus contributes 
more effectually to the accumulation of national wealth, he 
becomes himself more and more degraded as a rational being. 
In proportion as his sphere of action is narrowed his mental powers 
and habits become contracted ; and he resembles a subordinate 
part of some powerful machinery, useful in its place, but insignifi- 
cant and worthless out of it. If it be necessary, as it is beyond 
all question necessary, that society should be split into divisions 
and subdivisions, in order that its several duties may be well per- 
formed, yet we must be careful not to yield up ourselves wholly and 
exclusively to the guidance of this system ; we must observe what 
its evils are, and we should modify and restrain it, by bringing into 
action other principles, which may serve as a check and counter- 
poise to the main force. 

" There can be no doubt that every art is improved by confin- 
ing the professor of it to that single study. But, although the art 
itself is advaiiced by this concentration of mind in its service, the 
individual who is confined to it goes back. The advantage of the 
community is nearly in an inverse ratio with his own. 

" Society itself requires some other contribution from each indi- 
vidual, besides the particular duties of his profession. And, if no 
such liberal intercourse be established, it is the common failing of 
human nature, to be engrossed with petty views and interests, to 
underrate the importance of all in which we are not concerned, 
and to carry our partial notions into cases where they are inappli- 
cable, to act, in short, as so many unconnected units, displacing 
and repelling one another. 

"In the cuUivation of literature is found that common link,, 
which, among the higher and middling departments of life, unites 
the jarring sects and subdivisions into one interest, which supplies 
common topics, and kindles common feelings, unmixed with those 
narrow prejudices with which all professions are more or less 



344 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

infected. The knowledge, too, which is thus acquired, expands 
and enlarges the mind, excites its faculties, and calls those limbs 
and muscles into freer exercise which, by too constant use in one 
direction, not only acquire an illiberal air, but are apt also to lose 
somewhat of their native play and energy. And thus, without 
directly qualifying a. man for any of the employments of life, it 
enriches and ennobles all. Without teaching him the peculiar 
business of any one office or calling, it enables him to act his part 
in each of them with better grace and more elevated carriage ; 
and, if happily planned and conducted, is a main ingredient in 
that complete and generous education which fits a man ' to per- 
form justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both 
private and public, of peace and war.' " ^ 

8 

The view of Liberal Education, advocated in these extracts, is 
expanded by Mr. Davison in the Essay to which I have already 
referred. He lays more stress on the " usefulness " of Liberal 
Education in the larger sense of the word than his predecessor 
in the controversy. Listead of arguing that the Utility of knowl- 
edge to the individual varies inversely with its Utility to the public, 
he chiefly employs himself on the suggestions contained in Dr. 
Copleston's last sentences. He shows, first, that a Liberal Edu- 
cation is something far higher, even in the scale of Utility, than 
what is commonly called a Useful Education, and next, that it 
is necessary or useful for the purposes even of that Professional 
Education which commonly engrosses the title of Useful. The 
former of these two theses he recommends to us in an argument 
from which the following passages are selected : — 

" It is to take a very contracted view of life," he says, " to 
think with great anxiety how persons may be educated to superior 
skill "in their department, comparatively neglecting or excluding 
the more liberal and enlarged cultivation. In his (Mr, Edge- 
worth's) system, the value of every attainment is to be measured 
by its subserviency to a calling. The specific duties of that call- 
ing are exalted at the cost of those free and independent tastes 
and virtues which come in to sustain the common relations of 

1 Vide Milton on Education. 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 345 

society, and raise the individual in them. In short, a man is to 
be usurped by his profession. He is to be clothed in its garb 
from head to foot. His virtues, his science, and his ideas are all 
to be put into a gown or uniform, and the whole man to be 
shaped, pressed, and stiffened, in the exact mould of his technical 
character. Any interloping accomplishments, or a faculty which 
cannot be taken into public pay, if they are to be indulged in him 
at all, must creep along under the cloak of his more serviceable 
privileged merits. Such is the state of perfection to which the 
spirit and general tendency of this system would lead us. 

" But the professional character is not the only one which a per- 
son engaged in a profession has to support. He is not always 
upon duty. There are services he owes, which are neither paro- 
chial, nor forensic, nor military, nor to be described by any such 
epithet of civil regulation, and yet are in no wise inferior to those 
that bear these authoritative titles ; inferior neither in their intrinsic 
value, nor their moral import, nor their impression upon society. 
As a friend, as a companion, as a citizen at large ; in the connec- 
tions of domestic life ; in the improvement and embellishment of 
his leisure, he has a sphere of action, revolving, if you please, 
within the sphere of his profession, but not clashing with it ; in 
which if he can show none of the advantages of an improved 
understanding, whatever may be his skill or proficiency in the 
other, he is no more than an ill-educated man. 

" There is a certain faculty in which all nations of any refine- 
ment are great practitioners. It is not taught at school or college 
as a distinct science ; though it deserves that what is taught there 
should be made to have some reference to it ; nor is it endowed 
at all by the public ; everybody being obliged to exercise it for 
himself in person, which he does to the best of his skill. But in 
nothing is there a greater difference than in the manner of doing 
it. The advocates of professional learning will smile when we tell 
them that this same faculty which we would have encouraged, is 
simply that of speaking good sense in English, without fee or 
reward, in common conversation. They will smile when we lay 
some stress upon it ; but in reality it is no such trifle as they 
imagine. Look into the huts of savages, and see, for there is 
nothing to listen to, the dismal blank of their stupid hours of 



346 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

silence ; their professional avocations of war and hunting are 
over ; and, having nothing to do, they have nothing to say. Turn 
to improved life, and you find conversation in all its forms the 
medium of something more than an idle pleasure ; indeed, a very 
active agent in circulating and forming the opinions, tastes, and 
feelings of a whole people. It makes of itself a considerable affair. 
Its topics are the most promiscuous — all those which do not 
belong to any particular province. As for its power and influence, 
we may fairly say that it is of just the same consequence to a 
man's immediate society, how he talks, as how he acts. Now of 
all those who furnish their share to rational conversation, a mere 
adept in his own art is universally admitted to be the worst. The 
steriHty and uninstructiveness of such a person's social hours are 
quite proverbial. Or if he escape being dull, it is only by launch- 
ing into ill-timed, learned loquacity. We do not desire of him 
lectures or speeches ; and he has nothing else to give. Among 
benches he may be powerful ; but seated on a chair he is quite 
another person. On the other hand, we may affirm, that one of 
the best companions is a man who, to the accuracy and research 
of a profession, has joined a free excursive acquaintance with vari- 
ous learning, and caught from it the spirit of general observation." 

9 

Having thus shown that a Liberal Education is a real benefit to 
the subjects of it, as members of society, in the various duties and 
circumstances and accidents of life, he goes on, in the next place, 
to show that, over and above those direct services which might 
fairly be expected of it, it actually subserves the discharge of 
those particular functions, and the pursuit of those particular 
advantages, which are connected with professional exertion, and 
to which Professional Education is directed. 

" Wd admit," he observes, " that when a person makes a busi- 
ness of one pursuit, he is in the right way to eminence in it ; and 
that divided attention will rarely give excellence in many. But 
our assent will go no further. For, to think that the way to pre- 
pare a person for excelling in any one pursuit (and that is the 
only point in hand), is to fetter his early studies, and cramp the 
first development of his mind, by a reference to the exigencies of 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN ^^y 

that pursuit barely, is a very different notion, and one which, we 
apprehend, deserves to be exploded rather than received. Pos- 
sibly a few of the abstract, insulated kinds of learning might be 
approached in that way. The exceptions to be made are very 
few, and need not be recited. But for the acquisition of pro- 
fessional and practical ability such maxims are death to it. The 
main ingredients of that ability are requisite knowledge and culti- 
vated faculties; but, of the two, the latter is by far the chief. A 
man of well improved faculties has the command of another's 
knowledge. A man without them, has not the command of his 
own. 

" Of the intellectual powers, the judgment is that which takes 
the foremost lead in life. How to form it to the two habits it 
ought to possess, of exactness and vigour, is the problem. It 
would be ignorant presumption so much as to hint at any routine 
of method by which these qualities may with certainty be imparted 
to every or any understanding. Still, however, we may safely lay 
it down that they are not to be got ' by a gatherer of simples,' 
but are the combined essence and extracts of many different 
things, drawn from much varied reading and discipline, first, and 
observation afterwards. For if there be a single inteUigible point 
on this head, it is that a man who has been trained to think upon 
one subject or for one subject only, will never be a good judge 
even in that one : whereas the enlargement of his circle gives 
him increased knowledge and power in a rapidly increasing ratio. 
So much do ideas act, not as solitary units, but by grouping and 
combination ; and so clearly do all the things that fall within the 
proper province of the same faculty of the mind, intertwine with 
and support each other. Judgment lives as it were by compari- 
son and discrimination. Can it be doubted, then, whether the 
range and extent of that assemblage of things upon which it is 
practised in its first essays are of use to its power? 

" To open our way a little further on this matter, we will define 
what we mean by the power of judgment ; and then try to ascer- 
tain among what kind of studies the improvement of it may be 
expected at all. 

"Judgment does not stand here for a certain homely, useful 
quality of intellect, that guards a person from committing mis- 



348 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 

takes to the injury of his fortunes or common reputation ; but for 
that master-principle of business, Hterature, and talent, which 
gives him strength in any subject he chooses to grapple with, and 
enables him to seize the strong point in it. Whether this defini- 
tion be metaphysically correct or not, it comes home to the sub- 
stance of our inquiry. It describes the power that every one 
desires to possess when he comes to act in a profession, or else- 
where ; and corresponds with our best idea of a cultivated mind. 

" Next, it will not be denied, that in order to do any good to 
the judgment, the mind must be employed upon such subjects as 
come within the cognizance of that faculty, and give some real 
exercise to its perceptions. Here we have a rule of selection by 
which the different parts of learning may be classed for our pur- 
pose. Those which belong to the province of the judgment are 
religion (in its evidences and interpretation), ethics, history, elo- 
quence, poetry, theories of general speculation, the fine arts, and 
works of wit. Great as the variety of these large divisions of learn- 
ing may appear, they are all held in union by two capital principles 
of connexion. First, they are all quarried out of one and the 
same great subject of man's moral, social, and feeling nature. And 
secondly, they are all under the control (more or less strict) of 
the same power of moral reason." 

" If these studies," he continues, "be such as give a direct play 
and exercise to the faculty of the judgment, then they are the 
true basis of education for the active and inventive powers, whether 
destined for a profession or any other use. Miscellaneous as the 
assemblage may appear, of history, eloquence, poetry, ethics, etc., 
blended together, they will all conspire in an union of effect. 
They are necessary mutually to explain and interpret each other. 
The knowledge derived from them all will amalgamate, and the 
habits 4of a mind versed and practised in them by turns will join 
to produce a richer vein of thought and of more general and prac- 
tical application than could be obtained of any single one, as the 
fusion of the metals into Corinthian brass gave the artist his most 
ductile and perfect material. Might we venture to imitate an 
author (whom indeed it is much safer to take as an authority than 
to attempt to copy). Lord Bacon, in some of his concise illustra- 
tions of the comparative utility of the different studies, we should 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 349 

say that history would give fulness, moral philosophy strength, 
and poetry elevation to the understanding. Such in reality is the 
natural force and tendency of the studies ; but there are few 
minds susceptible enough to derive from them any sort of virtue 
adequate to those high expressions. We must be contented 
therefore to lower our panegyric to this, that a person cannot 
avoid receiving some infusion and tincture, at least, of those 
several qualities, from that course of diversified reading. One 
thing is unquestionable, that the elements of general reason are 
not to be found fully and truly expressed in any one kind of study ; 
and that he who would wish to know her idiom, must read it in 
many books. 

" If different studies are useful for aiding, they are still more 
useful for correcting each other ; for as they have their particular 
merits severally, so they have their defects, and the most exten- 
sive acquaintance with one can produce only an intellect either 
too flashy or too jejune, or infected with some other fault of con- 
fined reading. History, for example, shows things as they are, 
that is, the morals and interests of men disfigured and perverted 
by all their imperfections of passion, folly, and ambition ; philoso- 
phy strips the picture too much ; poetry adorns it too much ; 
the concentrated lights of the three correct the false peculiar 
colouring of each, and show us the truth. The right mode of 
thinking upon it is to be had from them taken all together, as 
every one must know who has seen their united contributions of 
thought and feehng expressed in the masculine sentiment of our 
immortal statesman, Mr. Burke, whose eloquence is inferior only 
to his more admirable wisdom. If any mind improved Hke his, 
is to be our instructor, we must go to the fountain head of things 
as he did, and study not his works but his method ; by the one we 
may become feeble imitators, by the other arrive at some ability 
of our own. But, as all biography assures us, he, and every other 
able thinker, has been formed, not by a parsimonious admeasure- 
ment of studies to some definite future object (which is Mr. Edge- 
worth's maxim), but by taking a wide and liberal compass, and 
thinking a great deal on many subjects with no better end in view 
than because the exercise was one which made them more ra- 
tional and intelligent beings." 



350 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL 



lO 

But I must bring these extracts to an end. To-day I have 
confined myself to saying that that training of the intellect, which 
is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge 
his duties to society. The Philosopher, indeed, and the man of 
the world differ in their very notion, but the methods, by which 
they are respectively formed, are pretty much the same. The 
Philosopher has the same command of matters of thought, which 
the true citizen and gentleman has of matters of business and 
conduct. If then a practical end must be assigned to a University 
course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its 
art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It 
neither confines its views to particular professions on the one 
hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works 
indeed of genius fall under no art ; heroic minds come under no 
rule ; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal 
authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors 
of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristodes or 
Newtons, of Napoleons or VVashingtons, of Raphaels or Shake- 
speares, though such miracles of nature it has before now con- 
tained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand 
with forming the critic or the experimentahst, the economist or 
the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope. But 
a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but 
ordinary end ; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, 
at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at 
supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims 
to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the 
ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and 
refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which 
gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judg- 
ments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing 
them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things 
as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of 
thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrele- 
vant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master 
any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate him- 



JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 35 1 

self to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how 
to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to 
come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them. 
He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every 
class ; he knows when to speak and when to be silent ; he is able 
to converse, he is able to listen ; he can ask a question pertinendy, 
and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart him- 
self; he is ever ready, yet never in the way ; he is a pleasant 
companion, and a comrade you can depend upon ; he knows 
when to be serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact 
which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be serious 
with effect. He has the repose of a mind which lives in itself, 
while it lives in the world, and which has resources for its happi- 
ness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which 
serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without 
which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and dis- 
appointment have a charm. The art which tends to make a man 
all this, is in the object which it pursues as useful as the art of 
wealth or the art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, 
and less tangible, less certain, less complete in its result. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

[An oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard 
College, August 31, 1837. The text is that of the second edition, 1838.] 

Mr. President and Gentlemen, 

I GREET you on the recommencement of our literary year. 
Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. 
We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation 
of histories, tragedies and odes, like the ancient Greeks ; for 
parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours ; nor for the 
advancement of science, like our cotemporaries in the British 
and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a 
friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people 
too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the 



352 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already 
come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else ; when the 
sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron 
lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something 
better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of depen- 
dence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws 
to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, can- 
not always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, 
actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who 
can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the 
star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, 
astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thou- 
sand years? 

In the light of this hope, I accept the topic which not only 
usage, but the nature of our association, seem to prescribe to 
this day, — the American Scholar. Year by year, we come up 
hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us in- 
quire what new lights, new events and more days, have thrown on 
his character, his duties, and his hopes. 

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, con- 
vey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, 
divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; 
just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its 
end. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime ; that 
there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, 
or through one faculty ; and that you must take the whole society 
to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or 
an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and states- 
man, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state 
these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims 
to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. 
The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must 
sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other 
laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of 
power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely 
subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and can- 
not be gathered. The state of society is one in which the mem- 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 353 

bers have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so 
many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an 
elbow, but never a man. 

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. 
The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is 
seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. 
He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks 
into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman 
scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the 
routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest 
becomes a form ; the attorney, a statute-book ; the mechanic, a 
machine ; the sailor, a rope of the ship. 

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated 
intellect. In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In the degen- 
erate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere 
thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. 

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office 
is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her 
monitory pictures. Him the past instructs. Him the future invites. 
Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for 
the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the 
only true master? But, as the old oracle said, " All things have two 
handles. Beware of the wrong one." In life, too often, the 
scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see 
liim in his school, and consider him in reference to the main 
influences he receives. 

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences 
upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun ; and, after 
sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ; ever the grass 
grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and be- 
holden. The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before 
this grand spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind. What 
is nature to him ? There is never a beginning, there is never an 
end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always 
circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own 
spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so 
entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on 
system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, 



354 ^^^ AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

without circumference, — in the mass and in the particle, Nature 
hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification 
begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by 
itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them 
one nature ; then three, then three thousand ; and so, tyrannized 
over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, 
diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, 
whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from 
one stem. It presently learns that, since the dawn of history there 
has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But 
what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not 
chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law 
of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a 
pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary 
motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method 
throughout matter ; and science is nothing but the finding of anal- 
ogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits 
down before each refractory fact ; one after another reduces all 
strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, 
and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the 
outskirts of nature, by insight. 

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, 
is suggested that he and it proceed from one root ; one is leaf and 
one is flower ; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And 
what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? — A thought 
too bold, — a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall 
have revealed the law of more earthly natures, — when he has 
learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy 
that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall 
look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming 
creator. He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, 
answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its 
beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of 
his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his 
attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of 
his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient 
precept, " Know thyself," and the modern precept, " Study nature," 
become at last one maxim. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 355 

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the 
mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of Hterature, of art, 
of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of 
the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, — 
learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, — by con- 
sidering their value alone. 

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age re- 
ceived into him the world around ; brooded thereon ; gave it the 
new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came 
into him, — life ; it went out from him, — truth. It came to him, 

— short-lived actions ; it went out from him, — immortal thoughts. 
It came to him, — business; it went from him, — poetry. It was, 

— dead fact \ now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can 
go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in 
proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does 
it soar, so long does it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, 
of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness 
of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the 
product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by 
any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist en- 
tirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his 
book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, 
in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to cotemporaries, or 
rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its 
own books ; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. 
The books of an older period will not fit this. 

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which 
attaches to the act of creation, — the act of thought, — is in- 
stantly transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to 
be a divine man. Henceforth the chant is divine also. The 
writer was a just and wise spirit. Henceforward it is settled, the 
book is perfect ; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his 
statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious. The guide is a 
tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a governor. The sluggish 
and pe'-verted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incur- 
sions of Reasons, having once so opened, having once received 
this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. 



356 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not 
by Man Thinking ; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, 
who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of 
principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it 
their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which 
Bacon, have given ; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were 
only young men in hbraries when they wrote these books. 

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. 
Hence the book-learned class, who value books, as such ; not as 
related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort 
of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers 
of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees. 

This is bad ; this is worse than it seems. Books are the best 
of things, well used ; abused, among the worst. What is the 
right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? 
They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a 
book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my ov/n 
orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing 
in the world of value is the active soul, — the soul, free, sover- 
eign, active. This every man is entitled to ; this every man con- 
tains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as 
yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth ; and utters truth, 
or creates. In this action, it is genius ; not the privilege of here 
and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its 
essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of 
art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of 
genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They 
pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius 
looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in 
his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create, — to 
create, — is the proof of a divine presence. Whatever talents 
may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not 
his; — cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. 
There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and crea- 
tive words ; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no 
custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's 
own sense of good and fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 357 

always from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of 
Hght without periods of soHtude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a 
fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of 
genius by over-influence. The hterature of every nation bears 
me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized 
now for two hundred years. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly 
subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instru- 
ments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When we can 
read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other 
men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of 
darkness come, as come they must, — when the soul seeth not, 
when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, — we 
repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our 
steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we 
may speak. The Arabian proverb says, " A fig tree, looking on a 
fig tree, becometh fruitful." 

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from 
the best books. They impress us with the conviction that one 
nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of 
the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with 
the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great 
part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There 
is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, 
who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, 
says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had 
well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded 
to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should 
suppose some pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls 
that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future 
wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before 
death for the young grub they shall never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggera- 
tion of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know that, as 
the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were 
boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be 
fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, 
who had almost no other information than by the printed page. 



358 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

I only would say that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. 
One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, " He 
that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out 
the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as well 
as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and inven- 
tion, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with 
manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the 
sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what 
is always true, that as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare 
among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the 
least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato 
or Shakspeare, only that least part, — only the authentic utter- 
ances of the oracle, — and all the rest he rejects, were it never 
so many times Plato's and Shakspeare's. 

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a 
wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious 
reading. Colleges, in Hke manner, have their indispensable 
ofifice, — to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, 
when they aim not to drill, but to create \ when they gather from 
far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by 
the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. 
Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pre- 
tension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though 
of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or 
syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede 
in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year. 

HI. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should 
be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or 
public labor as a pen-knife for an axe. The so-called " practical 
men" sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or 
see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, 
— who are always, more universally than any other class, the 
scholars of their day, — are addressed as women ; that the rough, 
spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a 
mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually dis- 
franchised ; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. 
As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. 
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. With- 



RALPH WALDO EMERSOM 359 

out it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into 
truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, 
we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there 
can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of 
thought, the transition through which it passes from the uncon- 
scious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I 
have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, 
and whose not. 

The world, — this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide 
around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts 
and make me acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this 
resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take 
my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct 
that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its 
order ; I dissipate its fear ; I dispose of it within the circuit of my 
expanding Ufe. So much only of life as I know by experience, so 
much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have 
I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can 
afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action 
in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. 
Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in elo- 
quence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity 
of action past by, as a loss of power. 

It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her 
splendid products. A strange process too, this by which experi- 
ence is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted 
into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours. 

The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now 
matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the 
air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business which 
we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. 
Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or 
know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our 
body. The new deed is yet a part of life, — remains for a time 
immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it 
detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought 
of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured ; the corruptible 
has put on incorruption. Always now it is an object of beauty, 



360 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

however base its origin and neighbourhood. Observe, too, the 
impossibihty of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot 
fly, it cannot shine, — it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without 
observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an 
angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private 
history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert 
form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. 
Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and 
dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many 
another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already ; 
friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation 
and world, must also soar and sing. 

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions 
has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of 
this globe of action and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there 
to hunger and pine ; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, 
and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards, who, 
getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and 
smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain 
to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of 
their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written 
out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail 
for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or 
ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock. 

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous 
of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in coun- 
try labors ; in town, — in the insight into trades and manufactures ; 
in frank intercourse with many men and women ; in science ; in 
art ; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by 
which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immedi- 
ately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through 
the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as 
the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the ma- 
sonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges 
and books only copy the language which the field and the work- 
yard made. 

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than 
books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 36 1 

in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the 
breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in 
day and night ; in heat and cold ; and as yet more deeply in- 
grained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the 
name of Polarity, — these " fits of easy transmission and reflec- 
tion," as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they 
are the law of spirit. 

The mind now thinks ; now acts ; and each fit reproduces the 
other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy 
no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and 
books are a weariness, — he has always the resource to live. Char- 
acter is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is 
the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul 
will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack 
organ or medium to impart his truth? He can still fall back on 
this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Think- 
ing is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. 
Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those " far 
from fame," who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his 
constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than 
it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time 
shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. 
Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from 
influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not 
out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their 
culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build 
the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible 
Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakspeare. 

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of 
the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is vir- 
tue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for un- 
learned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome ; always we 
are invited to work ; only be this limitation observed, that a man 
shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the 
popular judgments and modes of action. 

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by 
books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties. 

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be 



362 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

comprised in self-trust. The ofifice of the scholar is to cheer, to 
raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. 
He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. 
Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may cata- 
logue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being 
splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observa- 
tory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, 
which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and 
months sometimes for a few facts ; correcting still his old records ; 
— must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long 
period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and 
shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who 
shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech ; often 
forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, — how 
often ! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading 
the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of 
society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the 
self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of 
time, which are the nettles and tangUng vines in the way of the self- 
relying and self-directed ; and the state of virtual hostility in which 
he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. 
For all this loss and scorn, what offset ? He is to find consola- 
tion in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is 
one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes 
and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's 
eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar pros- 
perity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and com- 
municating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, 
and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human 
heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its 
commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and 
impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable 
seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, — this 
he shall hear and promulgate. 

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence 
in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he 
only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest 
appearance. Some great decorum^ some fetish of a government. 



kALPH WALDO EAlERSOM 363 

some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half man- 
kind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this 
particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question 
is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in 
listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that 
a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the 
earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, 
in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation 
to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach ; and bide 
his own time, — happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone 
that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on 
every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to 
tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going 
down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the 
secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any 
law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men 
whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own 
can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his 
spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have re- 
corded that which men in " cities vast " find true for them also. 
The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, — 
his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, — until he finds 
that he is the complement of his hearers ; — that they drink his 
words because he fulfils for them their own nature ; the deeper 
he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder 
he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally 
true. The people delight in it ; the better part of every man 
feels, This is my music ; this is myself. 

In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should 
the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition of 
freedom, " without any hindrance that does not arise out of his 
own constitution." Brave ; for fear is a thing which a scholar 
by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from 
ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dan- 
gerous times, arise from the presumption that, like children and 
women, his is a protected class ; or if he seek a temporary peace 
by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, 
hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping 



364 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep 
his courage up. So is the danger a danger still ; so is the fear 
worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its 
eye and search its nature, inspect its origin, — see the whelping 
of this lion, — which lies no great way back ; he will then find in 
himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent ; he will 
have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth 
defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see 
through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind cus- 
tom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by suffer- 
ance, — by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have 
already dealt it its mortal blow. 

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It is a mischievous 
notion that we are come late into nature ; that the world was 
finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in 
the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we 
bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt them- 
selves to it as they may ; but in proportion as a man has any thing 
in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet 
and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who 
can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who 
give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, 
and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the 
matter, that this thing which they do is the apple which the ages 
have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the 
harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Mac- 
donald sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes bot- 
any the most alluring of studies and wins it from the farmer and 
the herb-woman ; Davy, chemistry ; and Cuvier, fossils. The 
day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. 
The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled 
with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon. 

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, 
— darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me 
the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I have 
already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine 
that man is one. I believe man has been wronged ; he has 
wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 365 

him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. 
Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, 
and are called " the mass " and " the herd." In a century, in a 
millennium, one or two men ; that is to say, — one or two approxi- 
mations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in 
the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, — ripened ; 
yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full 
stature. What a testimony, — full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne 
to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the 
poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief The poor and 
the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for 
their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are 
content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, 
so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which 
it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They 
sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be their 
own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod 
selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one 
drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews 
combat and conquer. He hves for us, and we live in him. 

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power ; 
and power because it is as good as money, — the " spoils," so 
called, " of office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, 
and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake 
them, and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true, and 
leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be 
wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. 
The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the 
upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strewn along the 
ground. The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious 
monarchy, — more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene 
in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a 
man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all 
men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for 
me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The 
books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we 
have quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come 
up with the point of view which the universal mind took through 



366 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

the eyes of one scribe ; we have been that man, and have passed 
on. First, one ; then another ; we drain all cisterns, and, waxing 
greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abun- 
dant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The 
human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a 
barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. 
It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, 
hghtens the capes of Sicily ; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, 
illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light 
which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which ani- 
mates all men. 

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the 
Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say 
of nearer reference to the time and to this country. 

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas 
which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for 
marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the 
Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated 
of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all individuals, 
I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each 
individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; the 
youth, romantic ; the adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that 
a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced. 

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs 
be evil? We, it seems, are critical. We are embarrassed with 
second thoughts. We cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know 
whereof the pleasure consists. We are lined with eyes. We see 
with our feet. The time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness, — 

" Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 

It is so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would 
we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, 
and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary 
class as a mere announcement of the fact that they find them- 
selves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the 
coming state as untried ; as a boy dreads the water before he has 
learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would desire 
to be born in, — is it not the age of Revolution ; when the old and 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 367 

the new stand side by side and admit of being compared ; when 
the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope ; when the 
historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possi- 
bilities of the new era? This time, hke all times, is a very good 
one, if we but know what to do with it. 

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, 
as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philoso- 
phy and science, through church and state. 

One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which 
effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the 
state, assumed in Hterature a very marked and as benign an 
aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful ; the near, the low, 
the common, was explored and poetized. That which had been 
neghgently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and 
provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is sud- 
denly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of 
the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, 
the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is 
a great stride. It is a sign, — is it not? of new vigor when the 
extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into 
the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the 
romantic ; what is doing in Italy or Arabia ; what is Greek art, or 
Provencal minstrelsy ; I embrace the common, I explore and sit 
at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, 
and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would 
we really know the meaning of ? The meal in the firkin ; the 
milk in the pan ; the ballad in the street ; the news of the boat ; 
the glance of the eye ; the form and the gait of the body ; — show 
me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime 
presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does 
lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature ; let me see every 
trifle bristhng with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eter- 
nal law ; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the 
like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the 
world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form 
and order ; there is no trifle ; there is no puzzle ; but one design 
unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench. 

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, 



368 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This 
idea they have differently followed and with various success. In 
contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gib- 
bon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing is blood-warm. Man 
is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and 
wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The 
drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This per- 
ception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. 
Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has 
shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients. 

There is one man of genius who has done much for this phi- 
losophy of life, whose Hterary value has never yet been rightly esti- 
mated ; — I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative 
of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he 
endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popu- 
lar Christianity of his time. Such an attempt, of course, must have 
difficulty which no genius could surmount. But he saw and 
showed the connection between nature and the affections of the 
soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the 
visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving 
muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature ; he 
showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul mate- 
rial forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of 
beasts, of unclean and fearful things. 

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous poHtical 
movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Every 
thing that tends to insulate the individual, — to surround him with 
barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is 
his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sover- 
eign state ; — tends to true union as well as greatness. " I learned," 
said the melancholy Pestalozzi, " that no man in God's wide earth 
is either willing or able to help any other man." Help must come 
from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take 
up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of 
the past, all the hopes of the future. ^ He must be an university 
of knowledges. If there be one leeson more than another which 
should pierce his ear, it is. The world is nothmg, the man is all ; 
in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 369 

globule of sap ascends ; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason ; 
it is for you to know all ; it is for you to dare all. Mr. President 
and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man 
belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the 
American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly 
muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already 
suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private ava- 
rice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, 
indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The 
mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. 
There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. 
Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, 
inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of 
God, find the earth below not in unison with these, — but are hin- 
dered from action by the disgust which the principles on which 
business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, — 
some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet 
see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the 
barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant 
himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge 
world will come round to him. Patience, — patience ; with the 
shades of all the good and great for company ; and for solace the 
perspective of your own infinite life ; and for work the study and 
the communication of principles, the making those instincts prev- 
alent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in 
the world, not to be an unit ; — not to be reckoned one character ; 
— not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to 
bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the 
thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong ; and our 
opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? 
Not so, brothers and friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. 
We will walk on our own feet ; we will work with our own hands ; 
we will speak our own minds. Then shall man be no longer a 
name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread 
of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a 
wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time 
exist, because each beheves himself inspired by the Divine Soul 
which also inspires all men. 

2B 



370 WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 

WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED 

FOR 

HENRY DAVID THOREAU 
[From Walden, 1854. The text is that of the first edition.] 

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider 
every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed 
the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. 
In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for 
all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over 
each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on 
husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, 
mortgaging it to him in my mind ; even put a higher price on it, 
— took everything but a deed of it, — took his word for his deed, 
for I dearly love to talk, — cultivated it, and him too to some 
extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, 
leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be 
regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Where- 
ever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from 
me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat ? — better 
if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not 
likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too 
far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from 
it. Well, there I might live, I said ; and there I did live, for 
an hour, a summer and a winter life ; saw how I could let the 
years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come 
in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may 
place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. 
An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, 
and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be 
left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree 
could be seen to the best advantage ; and then I let it lie, fal- 
low perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of 
things which he can afford to let alone. 

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 37 1 

of several farms, — the refusal was all I wanted, — but I never 
got my fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest 
that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollo- 
well place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected 
materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off 
with ; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — 
every man has such a wife — changed her mind and wished to 
keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to 
speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it sur- 
passed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten 
cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. How- 
ever, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had 
carried it far enough ; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the 
farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, 
made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, 
and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus 
that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. 
But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried 
off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to 
landscapes, — 

" I am monarch of all I survey. 
My right there is none to dispute." 

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the 
most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed 
that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does 
not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in 
rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly 
impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and 
left the farmer only the skimmed milk. 

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were : its 
complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, 
half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the 
highway by a broad field ; its bounding on the river, which the 
owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, 
though that was nothing to me ; the gray color and ruinous 
state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which 
put such an interval between me and the last occupant ; the 



3/2 WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 

hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, show- 
ing what kind of neighbors I should have ; but above all, the 
recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, 
when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red 
maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in 
haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some 
rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up 
some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in 
short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy 
these advantages I was ready to carry it on ; like Atlas, to take 
the world on my shoulders, — I never heard what compensation 
he received for that, — and do all those things which had no 
other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be un- 
molested in my possession of it ; for I knew all the while that 
it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if 
I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have 
said. 

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large 
scale, (I have always cultivated a garden,) was, that I had had 
my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I 
have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the 
bad ; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be 
disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As 
long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little 
difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county 
jail. 

Old Cato, whose De Re Rustled is my Cultivator, says, and 
the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the 
passage, " When you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your 
mind, not to buy greedily ; nor spare your pains to look at it, 
and do not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener 
you g6 there the more it will please you, if it is good." I think 
I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as 
I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more 
at last. 

The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I 
purpose to describe more at length, for convenience, putting 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 373 

the experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not 
propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as 
chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake 
my neighbors up. 

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to 
spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was 
on Independence day, or the fourth of July, 1845, '^^7 house was 
not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the 
rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough 
weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool 
at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed 
door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, espe- 
cially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, 
so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude 
from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day 
more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain 
house on a mountain which I had visited a year before. This 
was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling 
god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds 
which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the 
ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial 
parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever 
blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted ; but few are the 
ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth 
everywhere. 

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a 
boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excur- 
sions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret ; 
but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down 
the stream of time. With this more substantial shelter about 
me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world. 
This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around 
me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as 
a picture in outlines. I did not need to go out doors to take 
the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. 
It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, 
even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, " An abode 
without birds is like a meat without seasoning." Such was not 



374 WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 

my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds ; 
not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near 
them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly 
frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and 
more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, 
serenade a villager, — the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet 
tanager, the field-sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others. 

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and 
a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than 
it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lin- 
coln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to 
fame, Concord Battle Ground ; but I was so low in the woods 
that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered 
with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, 
whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn 
high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the sur- 
face of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off 
its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its 
soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while 
the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direc- 
tion into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal con- 
venticle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later 
into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. 

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the inter- 
vals of a gentle rain storm in August, when, both air and water 
being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all 
the serenity of evening, and the wood-thrush sang around, and 
was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother 
than at such a time ; and the clear portion of the air above it 
being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light 
and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more 
important. From a hill top near by, where the wood had been 
recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the 
pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the 
shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other 
suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded 
valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between 
and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 37§ 

the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe 
I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer 
and more distant mountain ranges in the north-west, those true- 
blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of 
the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could 
not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is 
well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy 
to and float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, 
that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent 
but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. 
When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sud- 
bury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated 
perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a 
basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust 
insulated and floated even by this small sheet of intervening 
water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but 
dry /a/id. 

Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I 
did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pas- 
ture enough for my imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to 
which the opposite shore arose, stretched away toward the prairies 
of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room 
for all the roving families of men. " There are none happy in 
the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon," — said 
Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures. 

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those 
parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had 
most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a 
region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine 
rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial 
corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's 
Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my 
house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new 
and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while 
to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to 
Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal re- 
moteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and 
twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be 



3/6 WHERE 1 LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 

seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of 
creation where I had squatted — 

" There was a shepherd that did live, 
And held his thoughts as high 
As were the mounts whereon his flocks 
Did hourly feed him by." 

What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always 
wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts ? 

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of 
equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. 
I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. 
I got up early and bathed in the pond ; that was a religious 
exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say 
that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king 
Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each 
day ; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can under- 
stand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as 
much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invis- 
ible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest 
dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I 
could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was 
Homer's requiem ; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, sing- 
ing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cos- 
mical about it ; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the 
everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which 
is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. 
Then there is least somnolence in us ; and for an hour, at least, 
some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day 
and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be 
called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but 
by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened 
by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, 
accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of 
factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life 
than we fell asleep from ; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, 
and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man 
who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 377 

sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired 
of Hfe, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After 
a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its 
organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries 
again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I 
should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmos- 
phere. The Vedas say, " All intelligences awake with the 
morning." Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable 
of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and 
heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their 
music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought 
keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It 
matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of 
men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. 
Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that 
men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been 
slumbering ? They are not such poor calculators. If they had 
not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed 
something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor ; 
but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual 
exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. 
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who 
was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face ? 

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not 
by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, 
which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no 
more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to 
elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to 
be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and 
so to make a few objects beautiful ; but it is far more glorious to 
carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which 
we look, which morally we can do. To effect the quality of the 
day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make 
his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his 
most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used 
up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would dis- 
tinctly inform us how this might be done. 

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to 



378 WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 

front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn 
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that 
I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living 
is so dear ; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was 
quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the 
marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to 
rout all that was not life, and to cut a broad swath and shave 
close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest 
terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole 
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the 
world ; or if it were sublime, to knoM^ it by experience, and be 
able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For 
most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about 
it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat 
hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify 
God and enjoy him forever." 

Still we live meanly, like ants ; though the fable tells us that 
we were long ago changed into men ; like pygmies we fight with 
cranes, it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best 
virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretched- 
ness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has 
hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme 
cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, 
simplicity, simplicity ! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, 
and not a hundred or a thousand ; instead of a million count 
half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In 
the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the 
clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items 
to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder 
and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead 
reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who suc- 
ceedsr Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it 
be necessary eat but one ; instead of a hundred dishes, five ; 
and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a Ger- 
man Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary 
forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how 
it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so- 
called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 379 

and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown estab- 
lishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own 
traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calcu- 
lation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land ; 
and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a 
stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of 
purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that 
the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a 
telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, 
whether they do or not ; but whether we should hve like baboons 
or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, 
and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go 
tinkering upon our lives to improve thetn^ who will build rail- 
roads ? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to 
heaven in season ? But if we stay at home and mind our busi- 
ness, who will want railroads ? We do not ride on the railroad ; 
it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are 
that underlie the railroad ? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or 
a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are cov- 
ered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They 
are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new 
lot is laid down and run over ; so that, if some have the pleasure 
of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. 
And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a 
supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, 
they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, 
as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a 
gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and 
level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may 
sometimes get up again. 

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life ? We 
are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say 
that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand 
stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we haven't 
any of any consequence. We have the St. Vitus' dance, and 
cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a 
few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without 
setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the out- 



380 WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 

skirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements 
which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, 
nor a woman, I might also say, but would forsake all and follow 
that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if 
we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn 
it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see 
it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely ; 
yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man 
takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds 
up his head and asks, " What's the news ? " as if the rest of 
mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be 
waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose ; and then 
to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's 
sleep the news ia.«i> indispensable as the breakfast. " Pray tell 
me anything new that has happened to a man any where on this 
globe," — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man 
has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River ; 
never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed 
mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an 
eye himself. 

For my part, I could easily do without the post-ofifice. I think 
that there are very few important communications made through 
it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two 
letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth 
the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through 
which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which 
is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never 
read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one 
man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house 
burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or 
one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog 
killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need 
read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with 
the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and appli- 
cations ? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, 
and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. 
Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a 
rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 38 1 

foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of 
plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the 
pressure, — news which I seriously think a ready wit might 
write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient 
accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw 
in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and 
Granada, from time to time in the right proportions, — they may 
have changed the names a little since I saw the papers, — and 
serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be 
true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state 
or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports 
under this head in the newspapers : and as for England, almost 
the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the 
revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her 
crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing 
again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary char- 
acter. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, 
nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revo- 
lution not excepted. 

What news ! how much more important to know what that is 
which was never old ! " Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the 
state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. 
Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and 
questioned him in these terms : What is your master doing ? 
The messenger answered with respect : My master desires to 
diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the 
end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher re- 
marked : What a worthy messenger ! What a worthy messen- 
ger ! " The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy 
farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week, — for Sun- 
day is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh 
and brave beginning of a new one, — with this one other draggle- 
tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, — " Pause ! 
Avast ! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow ? " 

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while 
reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, 
and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with 
such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian 



382 WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 

Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable 
and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along 
the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that 
only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute 
existence, — that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the 
shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. 
By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be de- 
ceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of 
routine and habit every where, which still is built on purely 
illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true 
law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it 
worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that 
is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that " there was 
a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, 
was brought up by a forester, and growing up to maturity in 
that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with 
which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered 
him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his 
character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. 
So soul," continues the Hindoo philosopher, " from the circum- 
stances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until 
the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it 
knows itself to be Brahmen I perceive that we inhabitants of 
New England live this mean life that we do because our vision 
does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is 
which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town 
and see only the reality, where, think you, would the " Mill-dam " 
go to ? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld 
there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look 
at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a 
dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true 
gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. 
Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind 
the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eter- 
nity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these 
times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself 
culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine 
in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 383 

at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling 
and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe 
constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions ; whether 
we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our 
lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had 
so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could 
accomplish it. 

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be 
thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that 
falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently 
and without perturbation ; let company come and let company 
go, let the bells ring and the children cry, — determine to make 
a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream ? 
Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and 
whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. 
Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way 
is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail 
by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the 
engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If 
the bell rings, why should we run ? We will consider what kind 
of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and 
wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, 
and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that 
alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, 
through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and 
state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come 
to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, 
and say. This is, and no mistake ; and then begin, having -a, point 
d'appiii, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might 
found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a 
gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might 
know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered 
from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face 
to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if 
it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through 
the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your 
mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we 
are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel 



384 THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS 

cold in the extremities ; if we are alive, let us go about our 
business. 

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it ; but 
while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it 
is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would 
drink deeper ; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. 
I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. 
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I 
was born. The intellect is a cleaver ; it discerns and rifts its 
way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more 
busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and 
feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct 
tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some crea- 
tures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine 
and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest 
vein is somewhere hereabouts ; so by the divining rod and thin 
rising vapors I judge ; and here I will begin to mine. 



THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

[The Address delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Ceme- 
tery, Nov, 19, 1863.] 

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth 
upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and 
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that 
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long 
endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We 
have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting- 
place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might 
live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do 
this. 

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate — we cannot conse- 
crate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living 
and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN/ 385 

our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor 
long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what 
they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated 
here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have 
thus far nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedi- 
cated to the great task remaining before us — that from these 
honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which 
they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly 
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this 
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that 
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall 
not perish from the earth. 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
[Delivered March 4, 1865.] 

Fellow-countrymen : — At this second appearing to take the 
oath of the Presidential office, there is less occasion for an ex- 
tended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, 
somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting 
and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which 
public declarations have been constantly called forth on every 
point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the 
attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is 
new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which 
all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to 
myself ; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encourag- 
ing to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in 
regard to it is ventured. 

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all 
thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. 
All dreaded it — all sought to avert it. While the inaugural 
address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether 
to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the 
city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the 



386 SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 

Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties depre- 
cated war ; but one of them would make war rather than let 
the nation survive ; and the other would accept war rather than 
let it perish. And the war came. 

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not 
distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the South- 
ern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful 
interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause 
of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest 
was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, 
even by war ; while the Government claimed no right to do 
more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither 
party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration 
which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the 
cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the 
conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier tri- 
umph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both 
read the same Bible, and pray to the same God ; and each 
invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that 
any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing 
their bread from the sweat of other men's faces ; but let us 
judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could 
not be answered — that of neither has been answered fully. 
The Almighty has his own purposes. " Woe unto the world 
because of offenses ! for it must needs be that offenses come ; 
but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall 
suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in 
the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having con- 
tinued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and 
that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the 
woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern 
therein any departure from those divine attributes which the 
believers in a living God always ascribe to him ? Fondly do 
we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of 
war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it shall 
continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hun- 
dred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until 
every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 387 

drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so 
still it must be said, " The judgments of the Lord are true and 
righteous altogether." 

With malice toward none ; with charity for all ; with firmness 
in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to 
finish the work we are in ; to bind up the nation's wounds ; to 
care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, 
and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a 
just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations. 

CIVIL LIBERTY 

JOHN STUART MILL 
[The introductory chapter to the treatise On Liberty, 1859.] 

The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the 
Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of 
Philosophical Necessity ; but Civil, or Social Liberty : the nature 
and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by 
society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and 
hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly 
influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent 
presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognized as the 
vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that, 
in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the 
' remotest ages ; but in the stage of progress into which the more 
civilized portions of the species have now entered, it presents 
itself under new conditions, and requires a different and more 
fundamental treatment. 

The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most con- 
spicuous, feature in the portions of history with which we are 
earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and Eng- 
land. But in old times this contest was between subjects, or 
some classes of subjects, and the Government. By liberty, was 
meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers. 
The rulers were conceived (except in some of the popular gov- 
ernments of Greece) as in a necessarily antagonistic position to 



388 CIVIL LIBERTY 

the people whom they ruled. They consisted of a governing 
One, or a governing tribe or caste, who derived their authority 
from inheritance or conquest, who, at all events, did not hold it 
at the pleasure of the governed, and whose supremacy men did 
not venture, perhaps did not desire, to contest, whatever pre- 
cautions might be taken against its oppressive exercise. Their 
power was regarded as necessary, but also as highly dangerous ; 
as a weapon which they would attempt to use against their sub- 
jects, no less than against external enemies. To prevent the 
weaker members of the community from being preyed upon by 
innumerable vultures, it was needful that there should be an 
animal of prey stronger than the rest, commissioned to keep 
them down. But as the king of the vultures would be no less 
bent upon preying on the flock than any of the minor harpies, 
it was indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of defence 
against his beak and claws. The aim, therefore, of patriots, was 
to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to 
exercise over the community ; and this limitation was what they 
meant by liberty. It was attempted in two ways. First, by 
obtaining a recognition of certain immunities, called political 
liberties or rights, which it was to be regarded as a breach of 
duty in the ruler to infringe, and which, if he did infringe, 
specific resistance, or general rebellion, was held to be justifi- 
able. A second, and generally a later expedient, was the estab- 
lishment of constitutional checks, by which the consent of the 
community, or of a body of some sort, supposed to represent its 
interests, was made a necessary condition to some of the more 
important acts of the governing power. To the first of these 
modes of limitation, the ruling power, in most European coun- 
tries, was compelled, more or less, to submit. It was not so 
with the second ; and, to attain this, or when already in some 
degree possessed, to attain it more completely, became every- 
where the principal object of the lovers of liberty. And so long 
as mankind were content to combat one enemy by another, and 
to be ruled by a master, on condition of being guaranteed more 
or less efficaciously against his tyranny, they did not carry their 
aspirations beyond this point. 

A time, however, came, in the progress of human affairs, when 



JOHN STUART MILL 389 

men ceased to think it a necessity of nature that their governors 
should be an independent power, opposed in interest to them- 
selves. It appeared to them much better that the various 
magistrates of the State should be their tenants or delegates, 
revocable at their pleasure. In that way alone, it seemed, could 
they have complete security that the powers of government 
would never be abused to their disadvantage. By degrees this 
new demand for elective and temporary rulers became the 
prominent object of the exertions of the popular party, wherever 
any such party existed ; and superseded, to a considerable ex- 
tent, the previous efforts to limit the power of rulers. As the 
struggle proceeded for making the ruling power emanate from 
the periodical choice of the ruled, some persons began to think 
that too much importance had been attached to the limitation 
of the power itself. That (it might seem) was a resource against 
rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to those of the 
people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be 
identified with the people ; that their interest and will should be 
the interest and will of the nation. The nation did not need to 
be protected against its own will. There was no fear of its 
tyrannizing over itself. Let the rulers be effectually responsible 
to it, promptly removable by it, and it could afford to trust them 
with power of which it could itself dictate the use to be made. 
Their power was but the nation's own power, concentrated, and 
in a form convenient for exercise. This mode of thought, or 
rather perhaps of feeling, was common among the last genera- 
tion of European liberalism, in the Continental section of which 
it still apparently predominates. Those who admit any limit to 
what a government may do, except in the case of such govern- 
ments as they think ought not to exist, stand out as brilliant 
exceptions among the political thinkers of the Continent. A 
similar tone of sentiment might by this time have been preva- 
lent in our own country, if the circumstances which for a time 
encouraged it had continued unaltered. 

But, in political and philosophical theories, as well as in per- 
sons, success discloses faults and infirmities which failure might 
have concealed from observation. The notion, that the people 
have no need to limit their power over themselves, might seem 



390 CIVIL LIBERTY 

axiomatic, when popular government was a thing only dreamed 
about, or read of as having existed at some distant period of the 
past. Neither was that notion necessarily disturbed by such 
temporary aberrations as those of the French Revolution, the 
worst of which were the work of an usurping few, and which, in 
any case, belonged, not to the permanent working of popular 
institutions, but to a sudden and convulsive outbreak against 
monarchical and aristocratic despotism. In time, however, a 
democratic republic came to occupy a large portion of the 
earth's surface, and made itself felt as one of the most powerful 
members of the community of nations ; and elective and re- 
sponsible government became subject to the observations and 
criticisms which wait upon a great existing fact. It was now 
perceived that such phrases as "self-government," and "the 
power of the people over themselves," do not express the true 
state of the case. The " people " who exercise the power are 
not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; 
and the "self-government" spoken of is not the government of 
each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the 
people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numer- 
ous or the most active part of the people ; the majority, or those 
who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority ; the 
people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their num- 
ber ; and precautions are as much needed against this as against 
any other abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power 
of government over individuals loses none of its importance when 
the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, 
that is, to the strongest power therein. This view of things, 
recommending itself equally to the intelligence of thinkers and 
to the inclination of those important classes in European society 
to whose real or supposed interests democracy is adverse, has 
had 'no difficulty in establishing itself ; and in political specula- 
tions "the tyranny of the majority" is now generally included 
among the evils against which society requires to be on its 
guard. 

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, 
and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through 
the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons per- 



JOHN STUART MILL 39 1 

ceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, 
over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of 
tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by 
the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does 
execute its own mandates : and if it issues wrong mandates 
instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it 
ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formi- 
dable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not 
usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means 
of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, 
and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against 
the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough : there needs pro- 
tection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and 
feeling ; against the tendency of society to impose, by other 
means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of 
conduct on those who dissent from them ; to fetter the develop- 
ment, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individu- 
ality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters 
to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a 
limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with 
individual independence ; and to find that limit, and maintain 
it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good con- 
dition of human affairs, as protection against political des- 
potism. 

But though this proposition is not likely to be contested in 
general terms, the practical question, where to place the limit — 
how to make the fitting adjustment between individual inde- 
pendence and social control — is a subject on which nearly 
everything remains to be done. All that makes existence 
valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints 
upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, 
therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by 
opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the opera- 
tion of law. What these rules should be, is the principal ques- 
tion in human affairs ; but if we except a few of the most 
obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been 
made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two coun- 
tries, have decided it alike ; and the decision of one age or 



392 CIVIL LIBERTY 

country is a wonder to another. Yet the people of any given 
age and country no more suspect any difficulty in it, than if it 
were a subject on which mankind had always been agreed. The 
rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self- 
evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is 
one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which 
is not only, as the proverb says, a second nature, but is continu- 
ally mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing 
any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind 
impose on one another, is all the more complete because the 
subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary 
that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or 
by each to himself. People are accustomed to believe, and have 
been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character 
of philosophers, that their feelings, on subjects of this nature, are 
better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The 
practical opinion which guides them to their opinions on the 
regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person's 
mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those 
with whom he sympathizes, would like them to act. No one, 
indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment 
is his own liking ; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not 
supported by reasons, can only count as one person's prefer- 
ence ; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a 
similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many 
people's liking instead of one. To an ordinary man, however, 
his own preference, thus supported, is not only a perfectly 
satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any 
of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety, which are not 
expressly written in his religious creed ; and his chief guide in 
the interpretation even of that. Men's opinions, accordingly, 
on what is laudable or blameable, are affected by all the multi- 
farious causes which influence their wishes in regard to the 
conduct of others, and which are as numerous as those which 
determine their wishes on any other subject. Sometimes their 
reason — at other times their prejudices or superstitions : often 
their social affections, not seldom their antisocial ones, their 
envy or jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness : but 



JOHN STUART MILL 393 

most commonly, their desires or fears for themselves — their 
legitimate or illegitimate self-interest. Wherever there is an 
ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country 
emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class supe- 
riority. The morality between Spartans and Helots, between 
planters and negroes, between princes and subjects, between 
nobles and roturiers, between men and women, has been for the 
most part the creation of these class interests and feelings : and 
the sentiments thus generated, react in turn upon the moral feel- 
ings of the members of the ascendant class, in their relations 
among themselves. Where, on the other hand, a class, formerly 
ascendant, has lost its ascendancy, or where its ascendancy is 
unpopular, the prevailing moral sentiments frequently bear the 
impress of an impatient dislike of superiority. Another grand 
determining principle of the rules of conduct, both in act and 
forbearance, which have been enforced by law or opinion, has 
been the servility of mankind towards the supposed preferences 
or aversions of their temporal masters or of their gods. This 
servility, though essentially selfish, is not hypocrisy ; it gives 
rise to perfectly genuine sentiments of abhorrence ; it made men 
burn magicians and heretics. Among so many baser influences, 
the general and obvious interests of society have of course had 
a share, and a large one, in the direction of the moral senti- 
ments : less, however, as a matter of reason, and on their 
own account, than as a consequence of the sympathies and 
antipathies which grew out of them : and sympathies and antip- 
athies which had little or nothing to do with the interests of 
society, have made themselves felt in the establishment of 
moralities with quite as great force. 

The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful por- 
tion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically deter- 
mined the rules laid down for general observance, under the 
penalties of law or opinion. And in general, those who have 
been in advance of society in thought and feeling, have left this 
condition of things unassailed in principle, however they may 
have come into conflict with it in some of its details. They have 
occupied themselves rather in inquiring what things society ought 
to like or dislike, than in questioning whether its likings or dis- 



394 CIVIL LIBERTY 

likings should be a law to individuals. They preferred endeav- 
ouring to alter the feelings of mankind on the particular points 
on which they were themselves heretical, rather than make com- 
mon cause in defence of freedom, with heretics generally. The 
only case in which the higher ground has been taken on principle 
and maintained with consistency, by any but an individual here 
and there, is that of religious belief : a case instructive in many 
ways and not least so as forming a most striking instance of the 
fallibility of what is called the moral sense : for the odium theo- 
logicimi, in a sincere bigot, is one of the most unequivocal cases 
of moral feeling. Those who first broke the yoke of what called 
itself the Universal Church, were in general as little willing to 
permit difference of religious opinion as that church itself. But 
when the heat of the conflict was over, without giving a com- 
plete victory to any party, and each church or sect was reduced 
to limit its hopes to retaining possession of the ground it already 
occupied ; minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becom- 
ing majorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those 
whom they could not convert, for permission to differ. It is 
accordingly on this battle-field, almost solely, that the rights of 
the individual against society have been asserted on broad 
grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise author- 
ity over dissentients, openly controverted. The great writers to 
whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have 
mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and 
denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others 
for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance 
in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has 
hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious 
indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theo- 
logical quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. In the minds 
of almost all religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, 
the duty of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves. One per- 
son will bear with dissent in matters of church government, but 
not of dogma ; another can tolerate everybody, short of a Papist 
or an Unitarian ; another, every one who believes in revealed 
religion ; a few extend their charity a little further, but stop at 
the belief in a God and in a future state. Wherever the sentiment 



JOHN STUART MILL 395 

of the majority is still genuine and intense, it is found to have 
abated little of its claim to be obeyed. 

In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political 
history, though the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of 
law is lighter, than in most other countries of Europe ; and there 
is considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative 
or the executive power, with private conduct ; not so much from 
any just regard for the independence of the individual, as from 
the still subsisting habit of looking on the government as repre- 
senting an opposite interest to the public. The majority have 
not yet learnt to feel the power of the government their power, 
or its opinions their opinions. When they do so, individual 
liberty will probably be as much exposed to invasion from the 
government, as it already is from public opinion. But, as yet, 
there is a considerable amount of feeling ready to be called forth 
against any attempt of the law to control individuals in things 
in which they have not hitherto been accustomed to be controlled 
by it ; and this with very little discrimination as to whether the 
matter is, or is not, within the legitimate sphere of legal control ; 
insomuch that the feeling, highly salutary on the whole, is per- 
haps quite as often misplaced as well grounded in the particular 
instances of its application. There is, in fact, no recognized 
principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government 
interference is customarily tested. People decide according to 
their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good 
to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the 
government to undertake the business ; while others prefer to 
bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to 
the departments of human interests amenable to government 
control. And men range themselves on one or the other side 
in any particular case, according to this general direction of their 
sentiments ; or according to the degree of interest which they 
feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the govern- 
ment should do ; or according to the belief they entertain that the 
government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer ; 
but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consist- 
ently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a govern- 
ment. And it seems to me that, in consequence of this absence 



396 CIVIL LIBERTY 

of rule or principle, one side is at present as often wrong as the 
other ; the interference of government is, with about equal fre- 
quency, improperly invoked and improperly condemned. 

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple prin- 
ciple, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society 
with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, 
whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal 
penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That prin- 
ciple is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, 
individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of 
action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only 
purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any 
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to pre- 
vent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, 
is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled 
to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, be- 
cause it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of 
others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good 
reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or 
persuading him or entreating him, but not for compelling him, 
or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To 
justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him 
must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only 
part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to 
society, is that which concerns others. In the part which 
merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. 
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is 
sovereign. 

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is 
meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their 
faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons 
below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or 
womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being 
taken care of by others, must be protected against their own 
actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, 
we may leave out of consideration those backward states of 
society in which the race itself may be considered as in its 
nonage. The early difhculties in the way of spontaneous prog- 



JOHN STUART MILL 397 

ress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for 
overcoming them ; and a ruler full of the spirit of improve- 
ment is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain 
an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legiti- 
mate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided 
the end be their improvement, and the means justified by 
actually affecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no ap- 
plication to any state of things anterior to the time when man- 
kind have become capable of being improved by free and equal 
discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but impUcit 
obedience to an Abkar or a Charlemagne, if they are so for- 
tunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind have attained 
the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by con- 
viction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations 
with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either 
in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non- 
compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own 
good, and justifiable only for the security of others. 

It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could 
be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a 
thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate 
appeal on all ethical questions ; but it must be utility in the 
largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as 
a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the 
subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in 
respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of 
other people. If any one does an act hurtful to others, there is 
pritnd facie case for punishing him, by law, or, where legal 
penalties are not safely applicable, by general disapprobation. 
There are also many positive acts for the benefit of others, 
which he may rightfully be compelled to perform ; such as to 
give evidence in a court of justice ; to bear his fair share in 
the common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to 
the interest of the society of which he enjoys the protection ; 
and to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as 
saving a fellow-creature's life, or interposing to protect the de- 
fenceless against ill-usage, things which whenever it is obviously 
a man's duty to do, he may rightfully be made responsible to 



398 CIVIL LIBERTY 

society for not doing. A person may cause evil to others not 
only by his action but by his inaction, and in either case he 
is justly accountable to them for the injury. The latter case, 
it is true, requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion 
than the former. To make any one answerable for doing evil 
to others, is the rule ; to make him answerable for not prevent- 
ing evil, is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet there 
are many cases clear enough and grave enough to justify that 
exception. In all things which regard the external relations 
of the individual, he is de jure amenable to those whose in- 
terests are concerned, and if need be, to society as their pro- 
tector. There are often good reasons for not holding him to 
the responsibility ; but these reasons must arise from the special 
expediencies of the case : either because it is a kind of case in 
which he is on the whole likely to act better, when left to his 
own discretion, than when controlled in any way in which society 
have it in their power to control him ; or because the attempt 
to exercise control would produce other evils, greater than those 
which it would prevent. When such reasons as these preclude 
the enforcement of responsibility, the conscience of the agent 
himself should step into the vacant judgment-seat, and protect 
those interests of others which have no external protection ; 
judging himself all the more rigidly, because the case does 
not admit of his being made accountable to the judgment of his 
fellow-creatures. 

But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distin- 
guished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest ; 
comprehending all that portion of a person's life and conduct 
which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with 
their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. 
When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first 
instance : for what affects himself, may affect others through 
himself ; and the objection which may be grounded on this con- 
tingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, 
is the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, 
the inward domain of consciousness ; demanding liberty of con- 
science, in the most comprehensive sense ; liberty of thought 
and feeling ; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all 



JOHN STUART MILL 399 

subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. 
The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to 
fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of 
the conduct of an individual which concerns other people ; but, 
being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought 
itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practi- 
cally inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires 
liberty of tastes and pursuits ; or framing the plan of our life 
to suit our own character ; of doing as we like, subject to such 
consequences as may follow : without impediment from our 
fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, 
even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or 
wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual, follows the 
liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individ- 
uals ; freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to 
others : the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, 
and not forced or deceived. 

No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, 
respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government ; and 
none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and 
unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that 
of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not 
attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to 
obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, 
whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater 
gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to them- 
selves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the 
rest. 

Though this doctrine is anything but new, and, to some per- 
sons, may have the air of a truism, there is no doctrine which 
stands more directly opposed to the general tendency of existing 
opinion and practice. Society has expended fully as much effort 
in the attempt (according to its lights) to compel people to con- 
form to its notions of personal, as of social excellence. The 
ancient commonwealths thought themselves entitled to practise, 
and the ancient philosophers countenanced, the regulation of 
every part of private conduct by public authority, on the ground 
that the State had a deep interest in the whole bodily and 



400 CIVIL LIBERTY 

mental discipline of every one of its citizens ; a mode of thinking 
which may have been admissible in small republics surrounded 
by powerful enemies, in constant peril of being subverted by 
foreign attack or internal commotion, and to which even a short 
interval of relaxed energy and self-command might so easily be 
fatal, that they could not afford to wait for the salutary perma- 
nent effects of freedom. In the modern world, the greater size 
of political communities, and above all, the separation between 
the spiritual and temporal authority (which placed the direction 
of men's consciences in other hands than those which controlled 
their worldly affairs), prevented so great an interference by law 
in the details of private life ; but the engines of moral repression 
have been wielded more strenuously against divergence from the 
reigning opinion in self-regarding, than even in social matters ; 
religion, the most powerful of the elements which have entered 
into the formation of moral feeling, having almost always been 
governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy, seeking control 
over every department of human conduct, or by the spirit of 
Puritanism. And some of those modern reformers who have 
placed themselves in strongest opposition to the religions of the 
past, have been noway behind either churches or sects in their 
assertion of the right of spiritual domination : M. Comte, in 
particular, whose social system, as unfolded in his Systeme de 
Politique Positive, aims at establishing (though by moral more 
than by legal appliances) a despotism of society over the indi- 
vidual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal 
of the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers. 
Apart from the peculiar tenets of individual thinkers, there is 
also in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch 
unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the 
force of opinion and even by that of legislation ; and as the ten- 
dency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen 
society, and diminish the power of the individual, this encroach- 
ment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to dis- 
appear, but, on the contrary, to grow more and more formidable. 
The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow- 
citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule 
of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of 



JOHN STUART MILL 4OI 

the best and by some of the worst feehngs incident to human 
nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything 
but want of power ; and as the power is not decHning, but grow- 
ing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised 
against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circum- 
stances of the world, to see it increase. 

It will be convenient for the argument, if, instead of at once 
entering upon the general thesis, we confine ourselves in the first 
instance to a single branch of it, on which the principle here 
stated is, if not fully, yet to a certain point, recognized by the 
current opinions. This one branch is the Liberty of Thought; 
from which it is impossible to separate the cognate liberty of 
speaking and of writing. Although these liberties, to some 
considerable amount, form part of the political morality of all 
countries which profess religious toleration and free institutions, 
the grounds, both philosophical and practical, on which they 
rest, are perhaps not so familiar to the general mind, nor so 
thoroughly appreciated by many even of the leaders of opinion, 
as might have been expected. Those grounds, when rightly 
understood, are of much wider application than to only one 
division of the subject, and a thorough consideration of this 
part of the question will be found the best introduction to the 
remainder. Those to whom nothing which I am about to say 
will be new, may therefore, I hope, excuse me, if on a subject 
which for now three centuries has been so often discussed, I 
venture on one discussion more. 



NIL NISI BONUM 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 

[From RoimdaboiU Papers, 1863.] 

Almost the last words which Sir Walter spoke to Lockhart, 
his biographer, were, " Be a good man, my dear ! " and with the 
last flicker of breath on his dying lips, he sighed a farewell to 
his family, and passed away blessing them. 

Two men, famous, admired, beloved, have just left us, the 



402 NIL NISI BONUM 

Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time.^ Ere a few weeks are 
over, many a critic's pen will be at work, reviewing their lives 
and passing judgment on their works. This is no review, or 
history, or criticism: only a word in testimony of respect and 
regard from a man of letters, who owes to his own professional 
labour the honour of becoming acquainted with these two emi- 
nent literary men. One was the first ambassador whom the 
New World of Letters sent to the Old. He was born almost 
with the republic ; the pater patrice ^ had laid his hand on the 
child's head. He bore Washington's name: he came amongst 
us bringing the kindest sympathy, the most artless, smiling 
goodwill. His new country (which some people here might be 
disposed to regard rather superciliously) could send us, as he 
showed in his own person, a gentleman, who, though himself 
born in no very high sphere, was most finished, polished, easy, 
witty, quiet ; and, socially, the equal of the most refined Euro- 
peans. If Irving's welcome in England was a kind one, was it 
not also gratefully remembered ? If he ate our salt, did he not 
pay us with a thankful heart ? Who can calculate the amount 
of friendliness and good feeling for our country which this 
writer's generous and untiring regard for us disseminated in his 
own? His books are read by millions^ of his countrymen, 
whom he has taught to love England, and why to love her. It 
would have been easy to speak otherwise than he did : to inflame 
national rancours, which, at the time when he first became 
known as a public writer, war had just renewed : to cry down 
the old civilization at the expense of the new : to point out our 
faults, arrogance, short-comings, and give the republic to infer 
how much she was the parent state's superior. There are writers 
enough in the United States, honest and otherwise, who preach 
that kind of doctrine. But the good Irving, the peaceful, the 
friendly, had no place for bitterness in his heart, and no scheme 
but kindness. Received in England with extraordinary tender- 

1 Washington Irving died, November 28, 1859 ; Lord Macaulay died, December 
28, 1859. 

2 [Father of his country.] 

3 See his Life in the most remarkable Dictionary of Authors, published lately at 
Philadelphia, by Mr. Alibone. 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 403 

ness and friendship (Scott, Southey, Byron, a hundred others 
have borne witness to their liking for him), he was a messenger 
of goodwill and peace between his country and ours. " See, 
friends ! " he seems to say, " these English are not so wicked, 
rapacious, callous, proud, as you have been taught to believe 
them. I went amongst them a humble man ; won my way by 
my pen ; and, when known, found every hand held out to me 
with kindliness and welcome. Scott is a great man, you 
acknowledge. Did not Scott's King of England give a gold 
medal to him, and another to me, your countryman, and a 
stranger ? " 

Tradition in the United States still fondly retains the history 
of the feasts and rejoicings which awaited Irving on his return 
to his native country from Europe. He had a national wel- 
come ; he stammered in his speeches, hid himself in confusion, 
and the people loved him all the better. He had worthily rep- 
resented America in Europe. In that young community a man 
who brings home with him abundant European testimonials is 
still treated with respect (I have found American writers, of 
wide-world reputation, strangely solicitous about the opinions of 
quite obscure British critics, and elated or depressed by their 
judgments) ; and Irving went home medalled by the King, diplo- 
matized by the University, crowned and honoured and admired. 
He had not in any way intrigued for his honours, he had fairly 
won them ; and, in Irving's instance, as in others, the old coun- 
try was glad and eager to pay them. 

In America the love and regard for Irving was a national 
sentiment. Party wars are perpetually raging there, and are 
carried on by the press with a rancour and fierceness against 
individuals which exceed British, almost Irish, virulence. It 
seemed to me, during a year's travel in the country, as if no one 
ever aimed a blow at Irving. All men held their hands from 
that harmless, friendly peacemaker, I had the good fortune to 
see him at New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washing- 
ton,^ and remarked how in every place he was honoured and 



1 At Washington, Mr. Irving came to a lecture given by the writer, which Mr. 
Fillmore and General Pierce, the President and President Elect, were also kind 



404 NIL NISI BONUM 

welcome. Every large city has its " Irving House." The 
country takes pride in the fame of its men of letters. The gate 
of his own charming little domain on the beautiful Hudson 
River was for ever swinging before visitors who came to him. 
He shut out no one.^ I had seen many pictures of his house, 
and read descriptions of it, in both of which it was treated with 
a not unusual American exaggeration. It was but a pretty little 
cabin of a place ; the gentleman of the press who took notes of 
the place, whilst his kind old host was sleeping, might have vis- 
ited the whole house in a couple of minutes. 

And how came it that this house was so small, when Mr. 
Irving's books were sold by hundreds of thousands, nay, mill- 
ions, when his profits were known to be large, and the habits 
of life of the good old bachelor were notoriously modest and 
simple ? He had loved once in his life. The lady he loved 
died ; and he, whom all the world loved, never sought to replace 
her. I can't say how much the thought of that fidelity has 
touched me. Does not the very cheerfulness of his after life 
add to the pathos of that untold story ? To grieve always was 
not in his nature ; or, when he had his sorrow, to bring all the 
world in to condole with him and bemoan it. Deep and quiet he 
lays the love of his heart, and buries it ; and grass and flowers 
grow over the scarred ground in due time. 

Irving had such a small house and such narrow rooms, be- 
cause there was a great number of people to occupy them. He 
could only afiford to keep one old horse (which, lazy and aged as 
it was, managed once or twice to run away with that careless old 
horseman). He could only afford to give plain sherry to that 
amiable British paragraph-monger from New York, who saw the 



enough to attend together. " Two Kings of Brentford smelling at one rose," says 
Irving, looking up with his good-humoured smile. 

iMr. Irving described to me, with that humour and good humour which he 
always kept, how, amongst other visitors, a member of the British press who had 
carried his distinguished pen to America (where he employed it in vilifying his own 
country) came to Sunnyside, introduced himself to Irving, partook of his wine 
and luncheon, and in two days described Mr. Irving, his house, his nieces, his 
meal, and his manner of dozing afterwards, in a New York paper. On another 
occasion, Irving said, laughing, " Two persons came to me, and one held me in 
conversation whilst the other miscreant took my portrait ! " 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 405 

patriarch asleep over his modest, blameless cup, and fetched the 
public into his private chamber to look at him. Irving could 
only live very modestly, because the wifeless, childless man had 
a number of children to whom he was as a father. He had as 
many as nine nieces, I am told — I saw two of these ladies at 
his house — with all of whom the dear old man had shared the 
produce of his labour and genius. 

'■'■Be a good tnan, my deary One can't but think of these last 
words of the veteran Chief of Letters, who had tasted and tested 
the value of worldly success, admiration, prosperity. Was Irv- 
ing not good, and of his works, was not his life the best part ? 
In his family, gentle, generous, good-humoured, affectionate, 
self-denying: in society, a delightful example of complete 
gentlemanhood ; quite unspoiled by prosperity ; never obse- 
quious to the great (or, worse still, to the base and mean, as 
some public men are forced to be in his and other countries) ; 
eager to acknowledge every contemporary's merit ; always kind 
and affable to the young members of his calling ; in his pro- 
fessional bargains and mercantile dealings delicately honest and 
grateful ; one of the most charming masters of our lighter lan- 
guage ; the constant friend to us and our nation ; to men of 
letters doubly dear, not for his wit and genius merely, but as an 
exemplar of goodness, probity, and pure life : — I don't know 
what sort of testimonial will be raised to him in his own coun- 
try, where generous and enthusiastic acknowledgment of Ameri- 
can merit is never wanting ; but Irving was in our service as 
well as theirs ; and as they have placed a stone at Greenwich 
yonder in memory of that gallant young Bellot, who shared the 
perils and fate of some of our Arctic seamen, I would like to 
hear of some memorial raised by English writers and friends of 
letters in affectionate remembrance of the dear and good Wash- 
ington Irving. 

As for the other writer, whose departure many friends, some 
few most dearly-loved relatives, and multitudes of admiring 
readers deplore, our republic has already decreed his statue, 
and he must have known that he had earned this posthumous 
honour. He is not a poet and man of letters merely, but citi- 
zen, statesman, a great British worthy. Almost from the first 



406 NIL NISI BONUM 

moment when he appears, amongst boys, amongst college stu- 
dents, amongst men, he is marked, and takes rank as a great 
Englishman, All sorts of successes are easy to him : as a lad 
he goes down into the arena with others, and wins all the prizes 
to which he has a mind. A place in the senate is straightway 
offered to the young man. He takes his seat there ; he speaks, 
when so minded, without party anger or intrigue, but not with- 
out party faith and a sort of heroic enthusiasm for his cause. 
Still he is poet and philosopher even more than orator. That 
he may have leisure and means to pursue his darling studies, he 
absents himself for a while, and accepts a richly-remunerative 
post in the East. As learned a man may live in a cottage or a 
college common-room ; but it always seemed to me that ample 
means and recognized rank were Macaulay's as of right. Years 
ago there was a wretched outcry raised because Mr. Macaulay 
•dated a letter from Windsor Castle, where he was staying. 
Immortal gods ! Was this man not a fit guest for any palace in 
the world ? or a fit companion for any man or woman in it ? 
I dare say, after Austerlitz, the old K. K.^ court officials and 
footmen sneered at Napoleon for dating from Schonbrunn. But 
that miserable " Windsor Castle " outcry is an echo out of fast- 
retreating old world remembrances. The place of such a natural 
chief was amongst the first in the land ; and that country is best, 
according to our British notion at least, where the man of 
eminence has the best chance of investing his genius and 
intellect. 

If a company of giants were got together, very likely one or 
two of the mere six-feet-six people might be angry at the incon- 
testable superiority of the very tallest of the party : and so I 
have heard some London wits, rather peevish at Macaulay's 
superiority, complain that he occupied too much of the talk, and 
so forth. Now that wonderful tongue is to speak no more, will 
not many a man grieve that he no longer has the chance to lis- 
ten ? To remember the talk is to wonder : to think not only of 
the treasures he had in his memory, but of the trifles he had 
stored there, and could produce with equal readiness. Almost 
on the last day I had the fortune to see him, a conversation 

1 \Kaiserliche Konigliche, i.e. imperial and royal.] 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 407 

happened suddenly to spring up about senior wranglers, and 
what they had done in after life. To the almost terror of the 
persons present, Macaulay began with the senior wrangler of 
180 1-2-3-4, and so on, giving the name of each, and relating 
his subsequent career and rise. Every man who has known 
him has his story regarding that astonishing memory. It may 
be that he was not ill pleased that you should recognize it ; but 
to those prodigious intellectual feats, which were so easy to him, 
who would grudge his tribute of homage ? His talk was, in a 
word, admirable, and we admired it. 

Of the notices which have appeared regarding Lord Macaulay, 
up to the day when the present lines are written (the 9th of 
January), the reader should not deny himself the pleasure of 
looking especially at two. It is a good sign of the times when 
such articles as these (I mean the articles in The Times and 
Saturday Review) appear in our public prints about our pub- 
lic men. They educate us, as it were, to admire rightly. An 
uninstructed person in a museum or at a concert may pass 
by withour redegnizing a picture or a passage of music, 
which the connoisseur by his side may show him is a master- 
piece of harmony, or a wonder of artistic skill. After reading 
these papers you like and respect more the person you have 
admired so much already. And so with regard to Macaulay 's 
style there may be faults of course — what critic can't point 
them out ? But for the nonce we are not talking about faults : 
we want to say «// nisi honum} Well — take at hazard any three 
pages of the Essays or History ; — and, glimmering below the 
stream of the narrative, as it were, you, an average reader, see 
one, two, three, a half-score of allusions to other historic facts, 
characters, literature, poetry, with which you are acquainted. 
Why is this epithet used ? Whence is that simile drawn ? How 
does he manage, in two or three words, to paint an individual, 
or to indicate a landscape ? Your neighbour, who has his read- 
ing, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, 
shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not 
only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but 
the wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this 

1 [Nothing but good.] 



408 NIL NISI BONUM 

great scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence ; he 
travels a hundred miles to make a line of description. 

Many Londoners — not all — have seen the British Museum 
Library. I speak a coeiir ouvert} and pray the kindly reader to 
bear with me. I have seen all sorts of domes of Peters and 
Pauls, Sophia, Pantheon, — what not ? — and have been struck 
by none of them so much as by that catholic dome in Blooms- 
bury, under which our million volumes are housed. What peace, 
what love, what truth, what beauty, what happiness for all, what 
generous kindness for you and me, are here spread out ! It 
seems to me one cannot sit down in that place without a heart 
full of grateful reverence, I own to have said my grace at the 
table, and to have thanked heaven for this my English birth- 
right, freely to partake of these bountiful books, and to speak 
the truth I find there. Under the dome which held Macaulay's 
brain, and from which his solemn eyes looked out on the world 
but a fortnight since, what a vast, brilliant, and wonderful store 
of learning was ranged ! what strange lore would he not fetch 
for you at your bidding ! A volume of law, or history, a book of 
poetry familiar or forgotten (except by himself who forgot noth- 
ing), a novel ever so old, and he had it at hand. I spoke to him 
once about Clarissa. " Not read Clarissa f'' he cried out. " If 
you have once thoroughly entered on Clarissa and are infected 
by it, you can't leave it. When I was in India I passed one hot 
season at the hills, and there were the Governor-General, and 
the Secretary of Government, and the Commander-in-Chief, and 
their wives. I had Clarissa with me : and, as soon as they be- 
gan to read, the whole station was in a passion of excitement 
about Miss Harlowe and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly 
Lovelace ! The Governor's wife seized the book, and the Sec- 
retary waited for it, and the Chief Justice could not read it for 
tears ! " He acted the whole scene : he paced up and down the 
"Athenaeum" library: I dare say he could have spoken pages 
of the book — of that book, and of what countless piles of others ! 

In this little paper let us keep to the text of ?iil nisi l)onu??i. 
One paper I have read regarding Lord Macaulay says " he had 
no heart." Why, a man's books may not always speak the 

1 [With an open heart.] 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 409 

truth, but they speak his mind in spite of himself: and it seems 
to me this man's heart is beating through every page he penned. 
He is always in a storm of revolt and indignation against wrong, 
craft, tyranny. How he cheers heroic resistance ; how he backs 
and applauds freedom struggling for its own ; how he hates 
scoundrels, ever so victorious and successful ; how he recognizes 
genius, though selfish villains possess it! The critic who says 
Macaulay had no heart, might say that Johnson had none : and 
two men more generous, and more loving, and more hating, and 
more partial, and more noble, do not live in our history. Those 
who knew Lord Macaulay knew how admirably tender and gen- 
erous,' and affectionate he was. It was not his business to bring 
his family before the theatre footlights, and call for bouquets 
from the gallery as he wept over them. 

If any young man of letters reads this little sermon — and to 
him, indeed, it is addressed — I would say to him, " Bear Scott's 
words in your mind, and ' be good, my dear.'' " Here are two 
literary men gone to their account, and, Haus Deo^ as far as we 
know, it is fair, and open, and clean. Here is no need of apolo- 
gies for shortcomings, or explanations of vices which would have 
been virtues but for unavoidable «&:c. Here are two examples 
of men most differently gifted : each pursuing his calling ; each 
speaking his truth as God bade him ; each honest in his life ; 
just and irreproachable in his dealings ; dear to his friends ; 
honoured by his country ; beloved at his fireside. It has been 
the fortunate lot of both to give incalculable happiness and de- 
light to the world, which thanks them in return with an immense 
kindliness, respect, affection. It may not be our chance, brother 
scribe, to be endowed with such merit, or rewarded with such 
fame. But the rewards of these men are rewards paid to our 
service. We may not win the baton or epaulettes ; but God give 
us strength to guard the honour of the flag ! 

1 Since the above was written, I have been informed that it has been found, on 
examining Lord Macaulay's papers, that he was in the habit of giving away more 
than a fourth part of his annual income. 

2 [Praise God.j 



410 THE HERO AS POET 

THE HERO AS POET 

THOMAS CARLYLE 

[From Lecture 3, in On Heroes, Hero- Worship and the Heroic in History^ 

1841.] 

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions 
of old ages ; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a 
certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere 
scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it 
were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men 
in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god 
or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet 
are past. We are now to see our Hero in the less ambitious, 
but also less questionable, character of Poet ; a character which 
does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all 
ages ; whom all ages possess, when once he is produced, whom 
the newest age as the oldest may produce ; — and will produce, 
always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul ; in 
no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet. 

Hero, Prophet, Poet, — many different names, in different 
times and places, do we give to Great Men ; according to vari- 
eties we note in them, according to the sphere in which they 
have displayed themselves ! We might give many more names, 
on this same principle. I will remark again, however, as a fact 
not unimportant to be understood, that the different sphej-e con- 
stitutes the grand origin of such distinction ; that the Hero can 
be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to 
the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have 
no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of 
men.^ The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose 
stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not 
sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic 
warrior too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, 
Legislator, Philosopher ; — in one or the other degree, he could 
have been, he is all these. So too I cannot understand how a 
Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



411 



in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have 
written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that 
way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward. 
The grand fundamental character is that of Great Man ; that 
the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like 
Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of 
poetical men withal ; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity 
and geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, 
the clear deep-seeing eye : there it lies ; no man whatever, in 
what province soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch 
and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well : 
one can easily believe it ; they had done things a little harder 
than these I Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a 
still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare, — one knows not what he 
could not have made, in the supreme degree. 

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not 
make all great men, more than all other men, in the self-same 
mould. Varieties of aptitude doubtless ; but infinitely more of 
circumstance ; and far oftenest it is the latter only that are looked 
to. But it is as with common men in the learning of trades. 
You take any man, as yet a vague capability of a man, who 
could be any kind of craftsman ; and make him into a smith, a 
carpenter, a mason : he is then and thenceforth that and nothing 
else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a street- 
porter staggering under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at 
hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth 
and small Whitechapel needle, — it cannot be considered that 
aptitude of Nature alone has been consulted here either ! — The 
Great Man also, to what shall he be bound apprentice ? Given 
your Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, 
Poet ? It is an inexplicably complex controversial-calculation 
between the world and him ! He will read the world and its 
laws ; the world with its laws will be there to be read. What 
the world, on this matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said, 
the most important fact about the world. — 

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions 
of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synony- 



412 THE HERO AS POET 

mous ; Vates means both Prophet and Poet : and indeed at all 
times, Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred 
of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are still the same ; in 
this most important respect especially, That they have pene- 
trated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe ; what 
Goethe calls " the open secret." " Which is the great secret ? " 
asks one. — "The open secret," — open to all, seen by almost 
none ! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 
" the Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of 
Appearance," as Fichte styles it ; of which all Appearance, from 
the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appear- 
ance of Man and his work, is but the vesture, the embodiment 
that renders it visible. This divine mystery is in all times and 
in all places ; veritably is. In most times and places it is 
greatly overlooked ; and the Universe, definable always in one 
or the other dialect, as the realised Thought of God, is con- 
sidered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter, — as if, says the 
Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put 
together ! It could do no good, at present, to speak much about 
this ; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, 
live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity ; 
— a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise ! 

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the 
Vates, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it ; is a 
man sent hither to make it more impressively known to us. 
That always is his message ; he is to reveal that to us, — that 
sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever present 
with. While others forget it, he knows it ; — I might say, he 
has been driven to know it ; without consent asked of hhn, he 
finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here 
is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief ; this man too 
could ^ not help being a sincere man ! Whosoever may live in 
the show of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in 
the very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest with the 
Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a 
Vates, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and 
Prophet, participators in the "open secret," are one. 

With respect to their distinction again : The Vates Prophet, 



THOMAS CARLYLE 413 

we might say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the 
moral side, as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition ; the Vates 
Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, 
and the like. The one we may call a revealer of what we are 
to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two 
provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The 
Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love : how else shall 
he know what it is we are to do ? The highest Voice ever heard 
on this earth said withal, " Consider the lilies of the field ; they 
toil not, neither do they spin : yet Solomon in all his glory was 
not arrayed like one of these." A glance, that, into the deepest 
deep of Beauty. " The lilies of the field," — dressed finer than 
earthly princes, springing-up there in the humble furrow-field ; 
a beautiful eye looking-out on you, from the great inner Sea of 
Beauty ! How could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, 
rugged as she looks and is, were not inwardly Beauty ? In this 
point of view, too, a saying of Goethe's, which has staggered 
several, may have meaning: " The Beautiful," he intimates, " is 
higher than the Good : the Beautiful includes in it the Good." 
The true Beautiful; which however, I have said somewhere, 
" differs from the false as Heaven does from Vauxhall ! " So 
much for the distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet. — 

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets 
who are accounted perfect ; whom it were a kind of treason to 
find fault with. This is noteworthy ; this is right : yet in strict- 
ness it is only an illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is 
no perfect Poet ! A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all 
men ; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all poets 
when we read a poem well. The " imagination that shudders 
at the Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in 
degree, as Dante's own ? No one but Shakspeare can embody, 
out of Saxo Gramj?iaficus, the story of Hamlet as Shakspeare 
did : but every one models some kind of story out of it ; every 
one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in 
defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between 
round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. 
A man that has so much m.ore of the poetic element developed 
in him as to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his 



414 THE HERO AS POET 

neighbours. World-Poets too, those whom we are to take for 
perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same way. One who 
rises so far above the general level of Poets will, to such and 
such critics, seem a Universal Poet ; as he ought to do. And 
yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all 
men, have some touches of the Universal ; no man is wholly 
made of that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten : but not the 
noblest Shakspeare or Homer of them can be remembered for- 
ever ; — a day comes when he too is not ! 

Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between 
true Poetry and true Speech not poetical : what is the difference ? 
On this point many things have been written, especially by late 
German Critics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. 
They say, for example, that the Poet has an infinitude in him ; 
communicates an Unendiichkeit, a certain character of " infini- 
tude," to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not very pre- 
cise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remembering : if well 
meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my 
own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinc- 
tion of Poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a Song. 
Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say this as soon 
as anything else : If your delineation be authentically 7niisical, 
musical, not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the 
thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it 
will be poetical ; if not, not. — Musical : how much lies in that ! 
A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated 
into the inmost heart of the thing ; detected the inmost mystery 
of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it ; the inward har- 
mony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has 
a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, 
are melodious ; naturally utter themselves in Song. The mean- 
ing ctf Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, 
can express the effect music has on us ? A kind of inarticulate 
unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, 
and lets us for moments gaze into that ! 

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of 
song in it : not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent ; 
— the rhythm or tune to which the people there sing what they 



THOMAS CARLYLE 415 

have to say ! Accent is a kind of chanting ; all men have 
accent of their own, — though they only notice that of others. 
Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become 
musical, — with a finer music than the mere accent ; the speech 
of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All 
deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central 
essence of us. Song ; as if all the rest were but wrappages and 
hulls ! The primal element of us ; of us, and of all things. 
The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies ; it was the feeling 
they had of the inner structure of Nature ; that the soul of all 
her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, 
we will call musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that 
manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect ; it is a 
man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. 
See deep enough, and you see musically ; the heart of Nature 
being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. 

The Vates Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, 
seems to hold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the 
Vates Prophet ; his function, and our esteem of him for his 
function, alike slight. The Hero taken as Divinity ; the Hero 
taken as Prophet; then next the Hero taken only as Poet: does 
it not look as if our estimate of the Great Man, epoch after 
epoch, were continually diminishing ? We take him first for a 
god, then for one god-inspired ; and now in the next stage of it, 
his most miraculous word gains from us only the recognition 
that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of genius, or such- 
like ! — It looks so ; but I persuade myself that intrinsically it 
is not so. If we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in 
man still there is the same altogether peculiar admiration for the 
Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that there at any time 
was. 

I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally 
divine, it is that our notions of God, of the supreme unattain- 
able Fountain of Splendour, Wisdom and Heroism, are ever 
rising higher; not altogether that our reverence for these 
qualities, as manifested in our like, is getting lower. This is 
worth taking thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, the curse of 
these ages, a curse which will not last forever, does indeed in 



4l6 THE HERO AS POET 

this the highest province of human things, as in all provinces, 
make sad work ; and our reverence for great men, all crippled, 
blinded, paralytic as it is, comes-out in poor plight, hardly 
recognisable. Men worship the shows of great men ; the most 
disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. 
The dreariest, fatalest faith ; believing which, one would literally 
despair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at 
Napoleon ! A Corsican lieutenant of artillery ; that is the show 
of him : yet is he not obeyed, worshipped after his sort, as all 
the Tiaraed and Diademed of the world put together could not 
be ? High Duchesses, and ostlers of inns, gather round the 
Scottish rustic. Burns ; — a strange feeling dwelling in each that 
they had never heard a man like this ; that, on the whole, this 
is the man ! In the secret heart of these people it still dimly 
reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it at 
present, that this rustic, with his black brows and flashing sun- 
eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a 
dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others. 
Do not we feel it so ? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, 
Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us, — as, by 
God's blessing, they shall one day be ; were faith in the shows 
of things entirely swept-out, replaced by clear faith in the things, 
so that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted 
the other non-extant ; what a new livelier feeling towards this 
Burns were it ! 

Nay here in these pages, such as they are, have we not two 
mere Poets, if not deified, yet we may say beatified ? Shaks- 
peare and Dante are Saints of Poetry ; really, if we will think of 
it, canofiised, so that it is impiety to meddle with them. The un- 
guided instinct of the world, working across all these perverse 
impediments, has arrived at such result. Dante and Shakspeare 
are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in a kind of royal soli- 
tude ; none equal, none second to them : in the general feeling 
of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as of complete 
perfection, invests these two. They are canonised, though no 
Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it ! Such, in spite of 
every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still 
our indestructible reverence for heroism. — We will look a little 



THOMAS CARLYLE 417 

at these Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare : what 
httle it is permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will 
most fitly arrange itself in that fashion. 

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on 
Dante and his Book ; yet, on the whole, with no great result. 
His Biography is, as it were, irrecoverably lost for us. An un- 
important, wandering, sorrowstricken man, not much note was 
taken of him while he lived ; and the most of that has vanished, 
in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries since 
he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the 
Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book; — and 
one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, 
which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, 
whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face ; perhaps of 
all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on 
vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it ; the deathless 
sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless; — 
significant of the whole history of Dante ! I think it is the 
mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality ; an alto- 
gether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation 
of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child ; but 
all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnega- 
tion, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul looking- 
out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment 
of thick-ribbed ice ! Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent scorn- 
ful one : the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the 
thing that is eating-out his heart, — as if it were withal a mean 
insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and 
strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in pro- 
test, and life-long unsurrendering battle, against the world. 
Affection all converted into indignation : an implacable indigna- 
tion ; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god ! The eye too, it 
looks-out as in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry, Why the 
world was of such a sort ? This is Dante : so he looks, this 
" voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us " his mystic un- 
fathomable song." 

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well 



41 8 THE HERO AS POET 

enough with this Portrait and this Book. He was born at 
Florence, in the upper class of society, in the year 1265. His 
education was the best then going; much school-divinity, Aris- 
totelean logic, some Latin classics, — no inconsiderable insight 
into certain provinces of things : and Dante, with his earnest 
intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most 
all that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated understanding, 
and of great subtlety ; the best fruit of education he had con- 
trived to realise from these scholastics. He knows accurately 
and well what lies close to him ; but, in such a time, without 
printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what 
was distant : the small clear light, most luminous for what is 
near, breaks itself into singular chiaroscuro striking on what is 
far ofif. This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, 
he had gone through the usual destinies ; been twice out cam- 
paigning as a soldier for the Florentine State, been on embassy ; 
had in his thirty-fifth year, by natural gradation of talent and 
service, become one of the Chief Magistrates of Florence. He 
had met in boyhood a certain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful 
little girl of his own age and rank, and grown-up thenceforth in 
partial sight of her, in some distant intercourse with her. All 
readers know his graceful affecting account of this ; and then of 
their being parted ; of her being wedded to another, and of her 
death soon after. She makes a great figure in Dante's Poem ; 
seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all beings it 
might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last in 
the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole 
strength of affection loved. She died : Dante himself was 
wedded ; but it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, 
the rigorous earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not 
altogether easy to make happy. 

We will not complain of Dante's miseries : had all gone right 
with him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or 
whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neigh- 
bours, — and the world had wanted one of the most notable 
words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have had another 
prosperous Lord Mayor ; and the ten dumb centuries continued 
voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be 



THOMAS CARLYLE 419 

ten of them and more) had no Divina Commedia to hear! We 
will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for 
this Dante ; and he, struggling like a man led towards death 
and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him the choice 
of his happiness ! He knew not, more than we do, what was 
really happy, what was really miserable. 

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or 
some other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that 
Dante, whose party had seemed the stronger, was with his 
friends cast unexpectedly forth into banishment ; doomed thence- 
forth to a life of woe and wandering. His property was all 
confiscated and more ; he had the fiercest feeling that it was 
entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He 
tried what was in him to get reinstated ; tried even by warlike 
surprisal, with arms in his hand : but it would not do ; bad only 
had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in 
the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, 
to be burnt alive. Burnt alive ; so it stands, they say : a very 
curious civic document. Another curious document, some con- 
siderable number of years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the 
Florentine Magistrates, written in answer to a milder proposal 
of theirs, that he should return on condition of apologising and 
paying a fine. He answers, with fixed stern pride : " If I cannot 
return without calling myself guilty, I will never return, nunquam 
revet'tar.'''' 

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wan- 
dered from patron to patron, from place to place ; proving in 
his own bitter words, " How hard is the path. Come e duro calk.'''' 
The wretched are not cheerful company. Dante, poor and 
banished, with his proud earnest nature, with his moody hu- 
mours, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports of 
him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day 
for his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like 
way. Della Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and 
buffoons {nebulones ac histriones) making him heartily merry; 
when turning to Dante, he said : " Is it not strange, now, that 
this poor fool should make himself so entertaining ; while you, 
a wise man, sit there day after day, and have nothing to amuse 



420 THE HERO AS POET 

US with at all ? " Dante answered bitterly : " No, not strange ; 
your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, Like to Like ;'" — 
given the amuser, the amusee must also be given ! Such a man, 
with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was 
not made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evi- 
dent to him that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of 
benefit, in this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to 
wander, wander ; no living heart to love him now ; for his sore 
miseries there was no solace here. 

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself 
on him ; that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, 
with its Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal 
shadow. Florence thou shalt never see : but Hell and Purgatory 
and Heaven thou shalt surely see ! What is Florence, Can della 
Scala, and the World and Life altogether ? Eternity : thither, 
of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou and all things bound ! The 
great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and 
more in that awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded 
on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied or bodi- 
less, it is the one fact important for all men : — but to Dante, in 
that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape ; he 
no more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there with 
its gloomy circles, with its alti guai} and that he himself should 
see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we 
went thither, Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over 
it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 
" mystic unfathomable song ; " and this his Divine Coj?iedy, the 
most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result. 

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as 
we can see, a proud thought for him at times. That he, here in 
exile, could do this work ; that no Florence, nor no man or men, 
could hinder him from doing it, or even much help him in doing 
it. He knew too, partly, that it was great ; the greatest a man 
could do. " If thou follow thy star, Se hi segui tua stella,'''' — so 
could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need, still say 
to himself : " Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a glori- 
ous haven ! " The labour of writing, we find, and indeed could 

1 [Deep wailings.] 



THOMAS CARLYLE 421 

know otherwise, was great and painful for him ; he says, This 
Book, " which has made me lean for many years." Ah yes, it 
was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil, — not in sport, but in 
grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has 
been written, in many senses,- with his heart's blood. It is his 
whole history, this Book. He died after finishing it ; not yet 
very old, at the age of fifty-six; — broken-hearted rather, as is 
said. He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna : Hie claudor 
Dantes patriis extorris ab oris. The Florentines begged back 
his body, in a century after ; the Ravenna people would not 
give it. " Here am I Dante laid, shut-out from my native 
shores." 

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song : it is Tieck who calls it " a 
mystic unfathomable Song; " and such is literally the character 
of it. Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wher- 
ever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and 
melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the 
meaning too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely 
together here as everywhere. Song : we said before, it was the 
Heroic of Speech ! All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are 
authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right 
Poems are ; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, 
but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines, — to the great 
injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most 
part ! What we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he 
had any : why should he twist it into jingle, if he couhi speak it 
out plainly ? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true 
passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to 
Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and 
music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and 
sing ; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic 
of Speakers, — whose speech is Song. Pretenders to this are 
many ; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most part 
a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that 
of reading rhyme ! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be 
rhymed; — it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, 
what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who can speak 
their thought, not to sing it ; to understand that, in a serious 



422 THE HERO AS POET 

time, among serious men, there is no vocation in them for 
singing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are charmed 
by it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, 
and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, 
altogether an insincere and offensive thing. 

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his Divine 
Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very 
sound of it there is a canto fermo^ it proceeds as by a chant. 
The language, his simple terza ri?na,^ doubtless helped him in 
this. One reads along naturally with a sort of ////. But I add 
that it could not be otherwise ; for the essence and material of 
the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion 
and sincerity, makes it musical ; — go deep enough, there is 
music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an 
architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all : archi- 
tectural ; which also partakes of the character of music. The 
three kingdoms. Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradise, look-out on one 
another like compartments of a great edifice ; a great super- 
natural world-cathedral, piled-up there, stern, solemn, awful ; 
Dante's World of Souls ! It is, at bottom, the sincerest of all 
Poems ; sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. 
It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts ; and it goes 
deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people of 
Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, ^^ Eccovi 
r iiotn di' e stato alV Inferno, See, there is the man that was in 
Hell ! " Ah yes, he had been in Hell ; — in Hell enough, in 
long severe sorrow and struggle ; as the like of him is pretty 
sure to have been. Commedias that come out divi?te are not 
accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labour of any kind, high- 
est virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain ? Born as out of 
the black whirlwind ; — true ejfort, in fact, as of a captive strug- 
gling to free himself : that is Thought. In all ways we are " to 
become perfect through suffering.'''' — But, as I say, no work 
known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all been 
as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made 
him " lean " for many years. Not the general whole only ; every 

1 [This is intended to be paraphrased by the clause that follows it.] 

2 [The triple scheme of rhyme used in the poem.] 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



423 



compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into 
truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other ; each fits 
in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. 
It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the middle ages, 
rendered forever rhythmically visible there. No light task ; a 
right intense one : but a task which is done. 

Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the much that depends 
on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does 
not come before us as a large catholic mind ; rather as a narrow 
and even sectarian mind : it is partly the fruit of his age and 
position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, 
in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. 
He is world-great not because he is world-wide, but because he 
is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were dov/n 
into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. 
Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost development 
of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power 
of vision ; seizes the very type of a thing ; presents that and 
nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the 
Hall of Dite : red pinnacle, redhot cone of iron glowing through 
the dim immensity of gloom ; — so vivid, so distinct, visible at 
once and forever ! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of 
Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him : Tacitus 
is not briefer, more condensed ; and then in Dante it seems a 
natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting 
word ; and then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence 
is more eloquent than words. It is strange with what a sharp 
decisive grace he snatches the true likeness of a matter : cuts 
into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering 
giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke ; it is " as the sails sink, the 
mast being suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunetto Latini, 
with the cotto aspetto, "face baked,'''' parched brown and lean; 
and the " fiery snow," that falls on them there, a " fiery snow 
without M'ind," slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of 
those Tombs ; square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning 
Hall, each with its Soul in torment ; the lids laid open there ; 
they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. 
And how Farinata rises ; and how Cavalcante falls — at hear- 



424 THE HERO AS POET 

ing of his Son, and the past tense "///^ " ! ^ The very movements 
in Dante have something brief ; swift, decisive, almost military. 
It is of the inmost essence of his genius, this sort of painting. 
The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate, 
with its quick abrupt movements, its silent " pale rages," speaks 
itself in these things. 

For though this of painting is one of the outermost develop- 
ments of a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty 
of him ; it is physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man 
whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth 
something ; mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic 
of him. In the first place, he could not have discerned the 
object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had, what we 
may call, sympathised with it, — had sympathy in him to bestow 
on objects. He must have been shicere about it too ; sincere 
and sympathetic : a man without worth cannot give you the 
likeness of any object ; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy 
and trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not 
say that intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of dis- 
cerning what an object is ? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind 
may have will come out here. Is it even of business, a matter 
to be done ? The gifted man is he who sees the essential point, 
and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage : it is his faculty too, 
the man of business's faculty, that he discern the true likeness, 
not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. 
And how much of morality is in the kind of insight we get of 
anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it 
the faculty of seeing! " To the mean eye all things are trivial, 
as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the 
Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No 
most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In 
the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will 
take away with him. 

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a 
vividness as of fire in dark night ; taken on the wider scale, it 
is everyway noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca 
and her Lover, what qualities in that 1 A thing woven as out 

1 [Was.] 



THOMAS CARLYLE 425 

of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small flute-voice 
of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of hearts. A 
touch of womanhood in it too; della bella persona, che mi fu tolta;^ 
and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that he will never 
part from her ! Saddest tragedy in these alti giiai. And the 
racking winds, in that aer bruno^ whirl them away again, to wail 
forever! — Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor 
Francesca's father ; Francesca herself may have sat upon the 
Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet 
also infinite rigour of law : it is so Nature is made ; it is so 
Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is 
that of his Divine Comedfs being a poor splenetic impotent ter- 
restrial libel ; putting those into Hell whom he could not be 
avenged-upon on earth ! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a 
mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But 
a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either. His very 
pity will be cowardly, egoistic, — sentimentality, or little better. 
I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It 
is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love : like the wail 
of ^olean harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart; — and 
then that stern, sore-saddened heart 1 These longings of his 
towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the Paradiso ; 
his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been puri- 
fied by death so long, separated from him so far : — one likens 
it to the song of angels ; it is among the purest utterances of 
affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human 
soul. 

For the intense Dante is intense in all things ; he has got into 
the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occa- 
sion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of inten- 
sity. Morally great, above all, we must call him ; it is the 
beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his 
love; — as indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse oi 
his love ? " ^ Dio spiacenti ed a' tiemici sui, Hateful to God and 
to the enemies of God : " lofty scorn, unappeasable silent repro- 
bation and aversion : " JVon ragionam di lor, We will not speak 

1 [The fair body that was taken from me.] 

2 [Dusky air.] 



426 THE HERO AS POET 

of them, look only and pass." Or think of this; "They have 
not the hope to die, Non ha?i speranza di morte.^^ One day, it 
had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, 
wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely die ; 
" that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die." Such 
words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he 
is not to be paralleled in the modern world ; to seek his parallel 
we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique 
Prophets there. 

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly pre- 
ferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the Divine Cam- 
media. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general 
Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The 
Purgatorio and Paradiso, especially the former, one would 
almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing, 
that Purgatorio, " Mountain of Purification ; " an emblem of the 
noblest conception of that age. If Sin is so fatal, and Hell is 
and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man 
purified ; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beauti- 
ful how Dante works it out. The tremolar delV onde, that " trem- 
bling " of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of 
morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of 
an altered mood. Hope has now dawned ; never-dying Hope, 
if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of 
daemons and reprobate is underfoot ; a soft breathing of peni- 
tence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. 
" Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to 
him. " Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Gio- 
vanna; "I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil 
painfully up by that winding steep, " bent-down like corbels of 
a building," some of them, — crushed-together so "for the sin 
of pride;" yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they 
shall have reached the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by 
Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when 
one has prevailed ; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a 
psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance 
and got its sin and misery left behind ! I call all this a noble 
embodiment of a true noble thought, 



THOMAS CARLVLE 427 

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one 
another, are indispensable to one another. The Faradiso, a 
kind of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the 
Inferno ; the Inferno without it were untrue. All three make-up 
the true Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of the 
Middle Ages ; a thing forever memorable, forever true in the 
essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated in no 
human soul with such depth of veracity as in this of Dante's ; a 
man sent to sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very notable 
with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day reality, 
into the Invisible one ; and in the second or third stanza, we 
find ourselves in the World of Spirits ; and dwell there, as 
among things palpable, indubitable ! To Dante they ^vere so ; 
the real world, as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold 
to an infinitely higher Fact of a world. At bottom, the one was 
as preter-n2itnxa.\ as the other. Has not each man a soul ? He 
will not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is 
all one visible Fact ; he believes it, sees it ; is the Poet of it in 
virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, now 
as always. 

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an 
emblematic representation of his Belief about this Universe : — 
some Critic in a future age, like those Scandinavian ones the 
other day, who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, 
may find this too all an " Allegory," perhaps an idle Allegory 1 
It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christi- 
anity. It expresses, as in huge worldwide architectural em- 
blems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the 
two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns ; that 
these two differ not by preferability of one to the other, but by 
incompatibility absolute and infinite ; that the one is excellent 
and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as 
Gehenna and the Pit of Hell ! Everlasting Justice, yet with 
Penitence, with everlasting Pity, — all Christianism, as Dante 
and the Middle Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed : 
and yet, as I urged the other day, with what entire truth of 
purpose ; how unconscious of any embleming ! Hell, Purgatory, 
Paradise : these things were not fashioned as emblems ; was 



428 THE HERO AS POET 

there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their 
being emblems ? Were they not indubitable awful facts ; the 
whole heart of man taking them for practically true, all Nature 
everywhere confirming them ? So is it always in these things. 
Men do not believe an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his 
new thought may be, who considers this of Dante to have been all 
got-up as an Allegory, will commit one sore mistake ! — Pagan- 
ism we recognised as a veracious expression of the earnest awe- 
struck feeling of man towards the Universe ; veracious, true 
once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the 
difference of Paganism and Christianism ; one great difference. 
Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature ; the des- 
tinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in 
this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, 
the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature : a 
rude helpless utterance of the yfrj-/ Thought of men, — the chief 
recognised virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other 
was not for the senuous nature, but for the moral. What a 
progress is here, if in that one respect only ! — 

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in 
a very strange way, found a voice. The Divina CoiJimedia is of 
Dante's writing; yet in truth //belongs to ten Christian cen- 
turies, only the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The 
craftsman there, the smith with that metal of his, with these 
tools, with these cunning methods, — how little of all he does 
is properly his work ! All past inventive men work there with 
him ; — as indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the 
spokesman of the Middle Ages ; the Thought they lived by 
stands here in everlasting music. These sublime ideas of his, 
terrible and beautiful, are the fruit of the Christian Meditation 
of all the good men who had gone before him. Precious they ; 
but also is not he precious ? Much, had not he spoken, would 
have been dumb ; not dead, yet living voiceless. 

On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once 
of one of the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that 
Europe had hitherto realised for itself ? Christianism, as Dante 
sings it, is another than Paganism in the rude Norse mind : 
another than " Bastard Christianism " half-articulately spoken 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



429 



in the Arab Desert seven-hundred years before ! — The noblest 
idea made real hitherto among men, is sung, and emblemed- 
forth abidingly, by one of the noblest men. In the one sense 
and in the other, are we not right glad to possess it ? As I 
calculate, it may last yet for long thousands of years. For the 
thing that is uttered from the inmost parts of a man's soul, 
differs altogether from what is uttered by the outer part. The 
outer is of the day, under the empire of mode ; the outer passes 
away, in swift endless changes ; the inmost is the same yester- 
day, today and forever. True souls, in all generations of the 
world, who look on this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him; 
the deep sincerity of his thoughts, his woes and hopes, will 
speak likewise to their sincerity ; they will feel that this Dante 
too was a brother. Napoleon in Saint-Helena is charmed with 
the genial veracity of old Homer. The oldest Hebrew Prophet, 
under a vesture the most diverse from ours, does yet, because 
he speaks from the heart of man, speak to all men's hearts. 
It is the one sole secret of continuing long memorable. Dante, 
for depth of sincerity, is like an antique Prophet too ; his words, 
like theirs, come from his very heart. One need not wonder 
if it were predicted that his Poem might be the most enduring 
thing our Europe has yet made ; for nothing so endures as a 
truly spoken word. All cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and 
stone, and outer arrangement never so lasting, are brief in 
comparison to an unfathomable heart-song like this : one feels 
as if it might survive, still of importance to men, when these 
had all sunk into new irrecognisable combinations, and had 
ceased individually to be. Europe has made much ; great 
cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion 
and practice : but it has made little of the class of Dante's 
Thought. Homer yet ?>, veritably present face to face with 
every open soul of us ; and Greece, where is it. Desolate for 
thousands of years ; away, vanished ; a bewildered heap of 
stones and rubbish, the life and existence of it all gone. Like 
a dream ; like the dust of King Agamemnon ! Greece was ; 
Greece, except in the words it spoke, is not. 

The uses of this Dante ? We will not say much about his 
"uses." A human soul who has once got into that primal ele- 



430 THE HERO AS POET 

ment of Song, and sung-forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has 
worked in the depths of our existence ; feeding through long 
times the Wi^-roots of all excellent human things whatsoever, — in 
a way that " utilities " will not succeed well in calculating ! 
We will not estimate the Sun by the quantity of gas-light it 
saves us ; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no value. One 
remark I may make : the contrast in this respect between the 
Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Ma- 
homet, as we saw, had his Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi ; 
Dante's Italians seem to be yet very much where they were. 
Shall we say, then, Dante's effect on the world was small in 
comparison ? Not so : his arena is far more restricted ; but 
also it is far nobler, clearer ; — perhaps not less but more im- 
portant. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men, in the 
coarse dialect adapted to such ; a dialect filled with inconsis- 
tencies, crudities, follies : on the great masses alone can he act, 
and there with good and with evil strangely blended. Dante 
speaks to the noble, the pure and great, in all times and 
places. Neither does he grow obsolete, as the other does. 
Dante burns as a pure star, fixed there in the firmament, at 
which the great and the high of all ages kindle themselves : he 
is the possession of all the chosen of the world for uncounted 
time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In 
this way the balance may be made straight again. 

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the 
world, by what we can judge of their effect there, that a man and 
his work are measured. Effect ? Influence ? Utility ? Let a 
man do his work ; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he. 
It will grow its own fruit ; and whether embodied in Caliph 
Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so that it " fills all Morning 
and Evening Newspapers," and all Histories, which are a kind 
of distilled Newspapers ; or not embodied so at all ; — what 
matters that ? That is not the real fruit of it ! The Arabian 
Caliph, in so far only as he did something, was something. 
If the great Cause of Man, and Man's work in God's Earth 
got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter 
how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, 
and what uproar and blaring he made in this world, — he was 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



431 



but a loud-sounding inanity and futility ; at bottom, he was not 
at all. Let us honour the great empire of Silence, once more ! 
The boundless treasury which we do not jingle in our pockets, 
or count up and present before men ! It is perhaps, of all 
things, the usefullest for each of us to do, in these loud times. — 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

CHARLES LAMB 

[From Essays of Elia, 1822-24.] 

"A CLEAR fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game." 
This was the celebrated ivish of old Sarah Battle (now with God) 
who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. She 
was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-and-half players, 
who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to make 
up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning ; 
that they like to win one game and lose another ; that they can 
while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are in- 
different whether they play or no ; and will desire an adversary, 
who has slipped a wrong card, to take it up and play another. 
These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these 
flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said that they 
do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them. 

Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as 
I do, from her heart and soul, and would not, save upon a strik- 
ing emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with them. 
She loved a thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She 
took, and gave, no concessions. She hated favours. She never 
made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without 
exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight : cut 
and thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) " like a 
dancer." She sate bolt upright; and neither showed you her 
cards, nor desired to see yours. All people have their blind 
side — their superstitions, and I have heard her declare, under 
the rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit. 



432 MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

I never in my life — and I knew Sarah Battle many of the 
best years of it — saw her take out her snuff-box when it was 
her turn to play ; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game ; or 
ring for a servant till it was fairly over. She never introduced, 
or connived at, miscellaneous conversation during its process. 
As she emphatically observed, cards were cards : and if I ever 
saw unmingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it 
/was at the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had 
been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand ; and who, in his 
excess of candour, declared that he thought there was no harm 
in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in 
recreations of that kind ! She could not bear to have her noble 
occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in 
that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came 
into the world to do, — and she did it. She unbent her mind 
afterwards — over a book. 

Pope was her favourite author : his Rape of the Lock her 
favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over with 
me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem ; 
and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in what points 
it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations 
were apposite and poignant ; and I had the pleasure of sending 
the substance of them to Mr. Bowles : but I suppose they came 
too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that 
author. 

Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love ; but whist 
had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was 
showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The 
uncertainty and quick shifting of partners — a thing which the 
constancy of whist abhors ; — the dazzling supremacy and regal 
investiture of Spadille — absurd, as she justly observed, in the 
pure aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter gave him 
no proper power above his brother-nobility of the Aces; — the 
giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone ; — 
above all, the overpowering attractions of a Sans Prendre Vole, 
— to the triumph of which there is certainly nothing parallel 
or approaching in the contingencies of whist; — all these, she 
would say, make quadrille a game of captivation to the young 



CHARLES LAMB 433 

and enthusiastic. But whist was the solider game : that was her 
word. It was a long meal ; not, like quadrille, a feast of snatches. 
One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. 
They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady 
enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever- 
fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, 
she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroil- 
ments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel ; per- 
petually changing postures and connexions ; bitter foes to-day, 
sugared darlings to-morrow ; kissing and scratching in a breath ; 

— but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, 
deep-rooted, rational antipathies of the great French and 
English nations. 

A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favour- 
ite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage 

— nothing superfluous, ^o flushes — that most irrational of all 
pleas that a reasonable being can set up : — that anyone should 
claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and 
colour, without reference to the playing of the game, or the 
individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves ! She 
held this to be a solecism ; as pitiful an ambition at cards as 
alliteration is in authorship. She despised superficiality, and 
looked deeper than the colours of things. — Suits were soldiers, 
she would say, and must have a uniformity of array to distinguish 
them : but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should 
claim a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, that 
never were to be marshalled — never to take the field? — She 
even wished that whist were more simple than it is ; and, in my 
mind, would have stripped it of some appendages, which, in the 
state of human frailty, may be venially, and even commendably, 
allowed of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by 
the turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps ? — Why 
two colours, when the mark of the suit would have sufficiently 
distinguished them without it? — 

" But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably refreshed with 

the variety. Man is not a creature of pure reason — he must 

have his senses delightfully appealed to. We see it in Roman 

Catholic countries, where the music and the paintings draw in 

2 F 



434 ^^^^- BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

many to worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsensuaHsing 
would have kept out. — You yourself have a pretty collection of 
paintings — but confess to me, whether, walking in your gallery 
at Sandham, among those clear Vandykes, or among the Paul 
Potters in the ante-room, you ever felt your bosom glow with an 
elegant delight, at all comparable to that you have it in your power 
to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment of 
the court-cards ? — the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a pro- 
cession — the gay triumph-assuring scarlets — the contrasting 
deadly-killing sables — the 'hoary majesty of spades' — Pam 
in all his glory ! — 

" All these might be dispensed with ; and with their naked 
names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very 
well, pictureless ; but the beauty of cards would be extinguished 
for' ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must 
degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a dull deal board, or 
drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant car- 
pet (next to nature's), fitted arena for those courtly combatants 
to play their gallant jousts and turneys in! — Exchange those 
delicately-turned ivory markers — (work of Chinese artist, uncon- 
scious of their symbol, — or as profanely slighting their true 
application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned 
out those little shrines for the goddess) — exchange them for little 
bits of leather (our ancestors' money) or chalk and a slate ! " — 

The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my 
logic ; and to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite 
topic that evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for 
the legacy of a curious cribbage-board, made of the finest Sienna 
marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I 
have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence : — 
this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her 
death. 

The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept 
with religious care ; though she herself, to confess a truth, was 
never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar 
game, I have heard her say, — disputing with her uncle, who was 
very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to 
pronounce '■^Go — " or " Thafs a go^ She called it an ungram- 



CHARLES LAMB 



435 



matical game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to 
forfeit a rubber (a five dollar stake) because she would not take 
advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have given it to 
her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful tenure 
of declaring " tivo for his heels." There is something extremely- 
genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentle- 
woman born. 

Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, 
though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms — such as 
pique — repique — the capot — they savoured, she thought, of 
affectation. But games for two, or even three, she never greatly 
cared for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She would 
argue thus : — Cards are warfare : the ends are gain, with glory. 
But cards are war, in disguise of a sport : when single adver- 
saries encounter, the ends proposed are too palpable. By 
themselves, it is too close a fight ; with spectators, it is not much 
bettered. No looker-on can be interested, except for a bet, and 
then it is a mere affair of money ; he cares not for your luck 
sympathetically, or for your play. — Three are still worse ; a mere 
naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, with- 
out league or alliance ; or a rotation of petty and contradictory 
interests, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more 
hearty infractions of them, as in tradrille. — But in square games 
{she meant whist) all that is possible to be attained in card-play- 
ing is accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with 
honour, common to every species — though the latter can be but 
very imperfectly enjoyed in those other games, where the spec- 
tator is only feebly a participator. But the parties in whist are 
spectators and principals too. They are a theatre to themselves, 
and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, 
and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests be- 
yond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or 
fortune, not because a cold — or even an interested — bystander 
witnesses it, but because your partner sympathises in the con- 
tingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are 
exalted. Two again are mortified ; which divides their disgrace, 
as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the invidiovisness) your 
glories. Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to 



436 MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

one in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by 
multiplying the channels. War becomes a civil game. — By such 
reasonings as these the old lady was accustomed to defend her 
favourite pastime. 

No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any 
game, where chance entered into the composition, y^r 7iothi>ig. 
Chance she would argue — and here again, admire the subtlety 
of her conclusion ; — chance is nothing, but where something 
else depends upon it. It is obvious that cannot be glory. What 
rational cause of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size 
ace a hundred times together by himself ? or before spectators, 
where no stake was depending ? — Make a lottery of a hundred 
thousand tickets with but one fortunate number — and what pos- 
sible principle of our nature, except stupid wonderment, could it 
gratify to gain that number as many times successively without 
a prize ? — Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in back- 
gammon, where it was not played for money. She called it fool- 
ish, and those people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit 
under such circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little to 
her fancy. Played for a stake, they were a mere system of over- 
reaching. Played for glory, they were a mere setting of one 
man's wit, — his memory, or combination-faculty rather — against 
another's ; like a mock-engagement at a review, bloodless and 
profitless. She could not conceive a game wanting the spritely 
infusion of chance, the handsome excuses of good fortune. Two 
people playing at chess in a corner of a room, whilst whist was 
stirring in the centre, would inspire her with insufferable horror 
and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles and Knights, 
the imagery of the board, she would argue, (and I think in this 
case justly), were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard 
head-contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They 
reje"ct form and colour. A pencil and dry slate, she used to say, 
were the proper arena for such combatants. 

To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad 
passions, she would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He 
must be always trying to get the better in something or other : — 
that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended than upon 
a game at cards : that cards are a temporary illusion ; in truth, 



CHARLES LAMB 437 

a mere drama ; for we do but play at being mightily concerned, 
where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet, during the illusion, we 
are as mightily concerned as those whose stake is crowns and 
kingdoms. They are a sort of dream-fighting; much ado; great 
battling, and little bloodshed ; mighty means for disproportioned 
ends ; quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than 
many of those more serious games of life, which men play, with- 
out esteeming them to be such. — 

With great deference to the old lady's judgment in these 
matters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life, 
when playing at cards for nothmg has even been agreeable. 
When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes 
call for the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my 
cousin Bridget — Bridget Elia. 

I grant there is something sneaking in it ; but with a tooth- 
ache, or a sprained ankle, — when you are subdued and humble, 

— you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action. 
There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick 

whist. — 

I grant it is not the highest style of man — I deprecate the 
manes of Sarah Battle — she lives not, alas ! to whom I should 
apologise. — 

At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, 
come in as something admissible. — I love to get a tierce or a 
quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior 
interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. 

That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her) 

— (dare I tell thee, how foolish I am ?) — I wished it might have 
lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, 
though it was a mere shade of play : I would be content to go 
on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever boiling, 
that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget 
was doomed to apply after the game was over ; and, as I do not 
much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and 
I should be ever playing. 



438 THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

[From The English Mail- Coach, or the Glory of Motion, 1849; the text is 
that of De Quincey's revision of 1854.] 

What is to be taken as the predominant opinion of man, 
reflective and philosophic, upon sudden death ? It is remark- 
able that, in different conditions of society, sudden death has 
been variously regarded as the consummation of an earthly 
career most fervently to be desired, or, again, as that consumma- 
tion which is with most horror to be deprecated. Caesar the 
Dictator, at his last dinner-party (coend), on the very evening 
before his assassination, when the minutes of his earthly career 
were numbered, being asked what death, in his judgment, might 
be pronounced the most eligible, replied " That which should be 
most sudden." On the other hand, the divine Litany of our 
English Church, when breathing forth supplications, as if in 
some representative character, for the whole human race pros- 
trate before God, places such a death in the very van of horrors : 
" From lightning and tempest ; from plague, pestilence, and 
famine ; from battle and murder, and from sudden death — 
Good Lord, deliver us.'''' Sudden death is here made to crown 
the climax in a grand ascent of calamities ; it is ranked among 
the last of curses; and yet by the noblest of Romans it was 
ranked as the first of blessings. In that difference most readers 
will see little more than the essential difference between Chris- 
tianity and Paganism. But this, on consideration, I doubt. 
The Christian Church may be right in its estimate of sudden 
death ; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may also 
be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life, as that 
which seems most reconcilable with meditation, with penitential 
retrospects, and with the humilities of farewell prayer. There 
does not, however, occur to me any direct scriptural warrant 
for this earnest petition of the English Litany, unless under a 
special construction of the word " sudden." It seems a petition 
indulged rather and conceded to human infirmity than exacted 



THOMAS DE QUINCE Y 439 

from human piety. It is not so much a doctrine built upon the 
eternities of the Christian system as a plausible opinion built 
upon special varieties of physical temperament. Let that, how- 
ever, be as it may, two remarks suggest themselves as prudent 
restraints upon a doctriae which else 7nay wander, and has wan- 
dered, into an uncharitable superstition. The first is this : that 
many people are likely to exaggerate the horror of a sudden 
death from the disposition to lay a false stress upon words or 
acts simply because by an accident they have become yf//^/ words 
or acts. If a man dies, for instance, by some sudden death 
when he happens to be intoxicated, such a death is falsely 
regarded with peculiar horror ; as though the intoxication were 
suddenly exalted into a blasphemy. But that is unphilosophic. 
The man was, or he was not, habitually a drunkard. If not, if 
his intoxication were a solitary accident, there can be no reason 
for allowing special emphasis to this act simply because through 
misfortune it became his final act. Nor, on the other hand, if it 
were no accident, but one of his habitual transgressions, will it 
be the more habitual or the more a transgression because some 
sudden calamity, surprising him, has caused this habitual trans- 
gression to be also a final one. Could the man have had any 
reason even dimly to foresee his own sudden death, there would 
have been a new feature in his act of intemperance — a feature 
of presumption and irreverence, as in one that, having known 
himself drawing near to the presence of God, should have 
suited his demeanour to an expectation so awful. But this is no 
part of the case supposed. And the only new element in the 
man's act is not any element of special immorality, but simply 
of special misfortune. 

The other remark has reference to the meaning of the word 
sudden. Very possibly Caisar and the Christian Church do 
not differ in the way supposed, — that is, do not differ 
by any difference of doctrine as between Pagan and Chris- 
tian views of the moral temper appropriate to death ; but 
perhaps they are contemplating different cases. Both contem- 
plate a violent death, a Bta^avaros — death that is ySiatos, or, in 
other words, death that is brought about, not by internal and 
spontaneous change, but by active force having its origin from 



440 THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

without. In this meaning the two authorities agree. Thus far 
they are in harmony. But the difference is that the Roman by 
the word " sudden " means unlmgermg, whereas the Christian 
Litany by "sudden death " means a de^iXh. wit/iout 7uarning, con- 
sequently without any available summons to religious prepara- 
tion. The poor mutineer who kneels down to gather into his 
heart the bullets from twelve firelocks of his pitying comrades 
dies by a most sudden death in Caesar's sense ; one shock, one 
mighty spasm, one (possibly not one) groan, and all is over. 
But, in the sense of the Litany, the mutineer's death is far from 
sudden : his offence originally, his imprisonment, his trial, the 
interval between his sentence and its execution, having all 
furnished him with separate warnings of his fate — having all 
summoned him to meet it with solemn preparation. 

Here at once, in this sharp verbal distinction, we comprehend 
the faithful earnestness with which a holy Christian Church 
pleads on behalf of her poor departing children that God would 
vouchsafe to them the last great privilege and distinction pos- 
sible on a death-bed, viz., the opportunity of untroubled prepa- 
ration for facing this mighty trial. Sudden death, as a mere 
variety in the modes of dying where death in some shape is 
inevitable, proposes a question of choice which, equally in the 
Roman and the Christian sense, will be variously answered 
according to each man's variety of temperament. Meantime, 
one aspect of sudden death there is, one modification, upon 
which no doubt can arise, that of all martyrdoms it is the most 
agitating — viz., where it surprises a man under circumstances 
which offer (or which seem to offer) some hurrying, flying, 
inappreciably minute chance of evading it. Sudden as the 
danger which it affronts must be any effort by which such an 
evasion can be accomplished. Even that, even the sickening 
necessity for hurrying in extremity where all hurry seems des- 
tined to be vain, — even that anguish is liable to a hideous 
exasperation in one particular case : viz., where the appeal is 
made not exclusively to the instinct of self-preservation, but to 
the conscience, on behalf of some other life besides your own, 
accidentally thrown upon your protection. To fail, to collapse 
in a service merely your own, might seem comparatively venial ; 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 44 1 

though, in fact, it is far from venial. But to fail in a case where 
Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the final 
interests of another, — a fellow-creature shuddering between the 
gates of life and death : this, to a man of apprehensive con- 
science, would mingle the misery of an atrocious criminality 
with the misery of a bloody calamity. You are called upon, by 
the case supposed, possibly to die, but to die at the very moment 
when, by any even partial failure or effeminate collapse of your 
energies, you will be self-denounced as a murderer. You had 
but the twinkling of an eye for your effort, and that effort might 
have been unavailing ; but to have risen to the level of such an 
effort would have rescued you, though not from dying, yet from 
dying as a traitor to your final and farewell duty. 

The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, 
lurking far down in the depths of human nature. It is not 
that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials. 
But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such a trial is moving 
subterraneously in perhaps all men's natures. Upon the secret 
mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected, perhaps, 
to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to childhood, of 
meeting a lion, and, through languishing prostration in hope 
and the energies of hope, that constant sequel of lying down 
before the lion publishes the secret frailty of human nature — 
reveals its deep-seated falsehood to itself — records its abysmal 
treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream ; perhaps, 
as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every 
one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in 
Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the 
infirm places of his own individual will ; once again a snare is 
presented for tempting him into captivity to a luxury of ruin ; 
once again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls by his own 
choice ; again, by infinite iteration, the ancient earth groans to 
Heaven, through her secret caves, over the weakness of her 
child. " Nature, from her seat sighing through all her works," 
again " gives signs of woe that all is lost " ; and again the coun- 
ter-sigh is repeated to the sorrowing heavens for the endless 
rebellion against God. It is not without probability that in the 
world of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself the original 



442 THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

transgression. In dreams, perhaps under some secret conflict 
of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the 
time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each 
several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the 
treason of the aboriginal fall. 

The incident, so memorable in itself by its features of horror, 
and so scenical by its grouping for the eye, which furnished the 
text for this reverie upon Sudden Death occurred to myself in 
the dead of night, as a solitary spectator, when seated on the 
box of the Manchester and Glasgow mail, in the second or third 
summer after Waterloo. I find it necessary to relate the circum- 
stances, because they are such as could not have occurred unless 
under a singular combination of accidents. In those days, the 
oblique and lateral communications with many rural post-ofBces 
were so arranged, either through necessity or through defect of 
system, as to make it requisite for the main north-western mail 
(/..?., the down mail) on reaching Manchester to halt for a num- 
ber of hours ; how many, I do not remember ; six or seven, I 
think ; but the result was that, in the ordinary course, the mail 
recommenced its journey northwards about midnight. Wearied 
with the long detention at a gloomy hotel, I walked out about 
eleven o'clock at night for the sake of fresh air ; meaning to fall 
in with the mail and resume my seat at the post-office. The 
night, however, being yet dark, as the moon had scarcely risen, 
and the streets being at that hour empty, so as to offer no oppor- 
tunities for asking the road, I lost my way, and did not reach 
the post-office until it was considerably past midnight ; but, to 
my great relief (as it was important for me to be in Westmore- 
land by the morning), I saw in the huge saucer eyes of the mail, 
blazing through the gloom, an evidence that my chance was not 
yet lost. Past the time it was ; but, by some rare accident, the 
maifwas not even yet ready to start. I ascended to my seat on 
the box, where my cloak was still lying as it had lain at the 
Bridgewater Arms. I had left it there in imitation of a nautical 
discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the shore of his dis- 
covery, by way of warning off the ground the whole human race, 
and notifying to the Christian and the heathen worlds, with his 
best compliments, that he has hoisted his pocket-handkerchief once 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 443 

and for ever upon that virgin soil : thenceforward claiming theyV/i' 
dominii^ to the top of the atmosphere above it, and also the right. 
of driving shafts to the centre of the earth below it ; so that all 
people found after this warning either aloft in upper chambers of 
the atmosphere, or groping in subterraneous shafts, or squatting 
audaciously on the surface of the soil, will be treated as trespassers 
— kicked, that is to say, or decapitated, as circumstances may 
suggest, by their very faithful servant, the owner of the said pocket- 
handkerchief. In the present case, it is probable that my cloak 
might not have been respected, and the Jus gentium ^ might have 
been cruelly violated in my person — for, in the dark, people com- 
mit deeds of darkness, gas being a great ally of morality ; but it 
so happened that on this night there was no other outside passen- 
ger ; and thus the crime, which else was but too probable, missed 
fire for want of a criminal. 

Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity of lauda- 
num, having already travelled two hundred and fifty miles — 
viz., from a point seventy miles beyond London. In the taking 
of laudanum there was nothing extraordinary. But by accident 
it drew upon me the special attention of my assessor on the box, 
the coachman. And in that also there was nothing extraordi- 
nary. But by accident, and with great delight, it drew my own 
attention to the fact that this coachman was a monster in point 
of bulk, and that he had but one eye. In fact, he had been 
foretold by Virgil as 

" Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum." 

He answered to the conditions in every one of the items : — 
I, a monster he was : 2, dreadful ; 3, shapeless ; 4, huge ; 5, who 
had lost an eye. But why should that delight me ? Had he 
been one of the Calendars in the Arabian Nights and had 
paid down his eye as the price of his criminal curiosity, what 
right had / to exult in his misfortune ? I did not exult ; I 
delighted in no man's punishment, though it were even mer- 
ited. But these personal distinctions (Nos. i, 2, 3, 4, 5) iden- 
tified in an instant an old friend of mine whom I had known 

1 [Law of ownership.] 2 [Law of nations.] 



444 "^^^ VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

in the south for some years as the most masterly of mail-coacK- 
men. He was the man in all Europe that could (if any could) 
have driven six-in-hand full gallop over Al Sirat — that dread- 
ful bridge of Mahomet, with no side battlements, and of extra 
room not enough for a razor's edge — leading right across the 
bottomless gulf. Under this eminent man, whom in Greek I 
cognominated Cyclops Diphrelates (Cyclops the Charioteer), I, 
and others known to me, studied the diphrelatic art. Excuse, 
reader, a word too elegant to be pedantic. As a pupil, though 
I paid extra fees, it is to be lamented that I did not stand high 
in his esteem. It showed his dogged honesty (though, observe, 
not his discernment) that he could not see my merits. Let us 
excuse his absurdity in this particular by remembering his want 
of an eye. Doubtless that made him blind to my merits. In 
the art of conversation, however, he admitted that I had the 
whip-hand of him. On the present occasion great joy was at 
our meeting. But what was Cyclops doing here ? Had the 
medical men recommended northern air, or how ? I collected, 
from such explanations as he volunteered, that he had an in- 
terest at stake in some suit-at-law now pending at Lancaster ; 
so that probably he had got himself transferred to this station 
for the purpose of connecting with his professional pursuits an 
instant readiness for the calls of his lawsuit. 

Meantime, what are we stopping for ? Surgly we have now waited 
long enough. Oh, this procrastinating mail, and this procrastinat- 
ing post-office ! Can't they take a lesson upon that subject from 
me ? Some people have called 7ne procrastinating. Yet you are 
witness, reader, that I was here kept waiting for the post-office. 
Will the post-office lay its hand on its heart, in its moments of 
sobriety, and assert that ever it waited for me ? What are they 
about ? The guard tells me that there is a large extra accumu- 
lation^ of foreign mails this night, owing to irregularities caused 
by war, by wind, by weather, in the packet service, which as yet 
does not benefit at all by steam. For an extra hour, it seems, the 
post-office has been engaged in threshing out the pure wheaten 
correspondence of Glasgow, and winnowing it from the chaff of all 
baser intermediate towns. But at last all is finished. Sound your 
horn, guard ! Manchester, good-bye ! we've lost an hour by your 



THOMAS DE QUINCE Y 445 

criminal conduct at the post-office : which, however, though I do 
not mean to part with a serviceable ground of complaint, and one 
which really is such for the horses, to me secretly is an advantage, 
since it compels us to look sharply for this lost hour amongst the 
next eight or nine, and to recover it (if we can) at the rate of one 
mile extra per hour. Off we are at last, and at eleven miles an 
hour ; and for the moment I detect no changes in the energy or 
in the skill of Cyclops. 

From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually (though not in law) 
is the capital of Westmoreland, there were at this time seven stages 
of eleven miles each. The first five of these, counting from Man- 
chester, terminate in Lancaster ; which is therefore fifty-five miles 
north of Manchester, and the same distance exactly from Liver- 
pool. The first three stages terminate in Preston (called, by way 
of distinction from other towns of that name. Frond Preston) ; at 
which place it is that the separate roads from Liverpool and from 
Manchester to the north become confluent.^ Within these first 
three stages lay the foundation, the progress, and termination of 
our night's adventure. During the first stage, I found out that 
Cyclops was mortal : he was liable to the shocking affection of 
sleep — a thing which previously I had never suspected. If a 
man indulges in the vicious habit of sleeping, all the skill in auri- 
gation of Apollo himself, with the horses of Aurora to execute his 
notions, avails him nothing. " Oh, Cyclops ! " I exclaimed, " thou 
art mortal. My friend, thou snorest." Through the first eleven 
miles, however, this infirmity — which I grieve to say that he 
shared with the whole Pagan Pantheon — betrayed itself only by 
brief snatches. On waking up, he made an apology for himself 
which, instead of mending matters, laid open a gloomy vista of 
coming disasters. The summer assizes, he reminded me, were 
now going on at Lancaster : in consequence of which for three 
nights and three days he had not lain down on a bed. During 
the day he was waiting for his own summons as a witness on the 

1 " Confluent" : — Suppose a capital Y (the Pythagorean letter) : Lancaster is at 
the foot of this letter ; Liverpool at the top of the right branch ; Manchester at the 
top of the left ; Proud Preston at the centre, where the two branches unite. It is 
thirty-three miles along either of the two branches ; it is twenty-two miles along the 
stem, — viz., from Preston in the middle to Lancaster at the root. There's a lesson 
in geography for the reader ! 



446 THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

trial in which he was interested, or else, lest he should be missing 
at the critical moment, was drinking with the other witnesses under 
the pastoral surveillance of the attorneys. During the night, or 
that part of it which at sea would form the middle watch, he was 
driving. This explanation certainly accounted for his drowsiness, 
but in a way which made it much more alarming ; since now, after 
several days' resistance to this infirmity, at length he was steadily 
giving way. Throughout the second stage he grew more and 
more drowsy. In the second mile of the third stage he surrendered 
himself finally and without a struggle to his perilous temptation. 
All his past resistance had but deepened the weight of this final 
oppression. Seven atmospheres of sleep rested upon him ; and, 
to consummate the case, our worthy guard, after singing " Love 
amongst the Roses " for perhaps thirty times, without invitation 
and without applause, had in revenge moodily resigned himself 
to slumber — not so deep, doubtless, as the coachman's, but 
deep enough for mischief. And thus at last, about ten miles 
from Preston, it came about that I found myself left in charge 
of his Majesty's London and Glasgow mail, then running at the 
least twelve miles an hour. 

What made this negligence less criminal than else it must 
have been thought was the condition of the roads at night dur- 
ing the assizes. At that time, all the law business of populous 
Liverpool, and also of populous Manchester, with its vast cinc- 
ture of populous rural districts, was called up by ancient usage 
to the tribunal of Lilliputian Lancaster. To break up this old 
traditional usage required, i, a conflict with powerful established 
interests, 2, a large system of new arrangements, and 3, a new 
parliamentary statute. But as yet this change was merely in 
contemplation. As things were at present, twice in the year ^ so 
vast a body of business rolled northwards from the southern 
quarter of the county that for a fortnight at least it occupied the 
severe exertions of two judges in its despatch. The conse- 
quence of this was that every horse available for such a service, 
along the whole line of road, was exhausted in carrying down 
the multitudes of people who were parties to the different suits. 

1 " Twice in the year " : — There were at that time only two assizes even in the 
most populous counties — viz., the Lent Assizes and the Summer Assizes. 



THOMAS DE QUINCE Y 447 

By sunset, therefore, it usually happened that, through utter 
exhaustion amongst men and horses, the road sank into profound 
silence. Except the exhaustion in the vast adjacent county of 
York from a contested election, no such silence succeeding to 
no such fiery uproar was ever witnessed in England. 

On this occasion the usual silence and solitude prevailed along 
the road. Not a hoof nor a wheel was to be heard. And, to 
strengthen this false luxurious confidence in the noiseless roads, 
it happened also that the night was one of peculiar solemnity 
and peace. For my own part, though slightly alive to the possi- 
bilities of peril, I had so far yielded to the influence of the 
mighty calm as to sink into a profound reverie. The month 
was August; in the middle of which lay my own birthday — a 
festival to every thoughtful man suggesting solemn and often 
sigh-born' thoughts. The county was my own native county — 
upon which, in its southern section, more than upon any equal 
area known to man past or present, had descended the original 
curse of labour in its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies 
only of men, as of slaVes, or criminals in mines, but working 
through the fiery will. Upon no equal space of earth was, or 
ever had been, the same energy of human power put forth daily. 
At this particular season also of the assizes, that dreadful hurri- 
cane of flight and pursuit, as it might have seemed to a stranger, 
which swept to and from Lancaster all day long, hunting the 
county up and down, and regularly subsiding back into silence 
about sunset, could not fail (when united with this permanent 
distinction of Lancashire as the very metropolis and citadel of 
labour) to point the thoughts pathetically upon that counter- 
vision of rest, of saintly repose from strife and sorrow, towards 
which, as to their secret haven, the profounder aspirations of 
man's heart are in solitude continually travelling. Obliquely 
upon our left we were nearing the sea ; which also must, under 
the present circumstances, be repeating the general state of 
halcyon repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore each 
an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight and the 
first timid tremblings of the dawn were by this time blending ; 

1 " Sigh-born " : — I owe the suggestion of this word to an obscure remembrance 
of a beautiful phrase in " Giraldus Cambrensis " - ■ viz. suspiriosce cogitationes. 



448 THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

and the blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state 
of unity by a slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that 
covered the woods and fields, but with a veil of equable trans- 
parency. Except the feet of our own horses, — which, running 
on a sandy margin of the road, made but little disturbance, — 
there was no sound abroad. In the clouds and on the earth 
prevailed the same majestic peace ; and, in spite of all that the 
villain of a schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer 
thoughts, which are the thoughts of our infancy, we still believe 
in no such nonsense as a limited atmosphere. Whatever we 
may swear with our false feigning lips, in our faithful hearts we 
still believe, and must for ever believe, in fields of air traversing 
the total gulf between earth and the central heavens. Still, in 
the confidence of children that tread without fear every chamber 
in their father's house, and to whom no door is closed, we, in 
that Sabbatic vision which sometimes is revealed for an hour 
upon nights like this, ascend with easy steps from the sorrow- 
stricken fields of earth upwards to the sandals of God. 

Suddenly, from thoughts hke these I was awakened to a sullen 
sound, as of some motion on the distant road. It stole upon the 
air for a moment ; I listened in awe ; but then it died away. Once 
roused, however, I could not but observe with alarm the quickened 
motion of our horses. Ten years' experience had made my eye 
learned in the valuing of motion ; and I saw that we were now 
running thirteen miles an hour. I pretend to no presence of mind. 
On the contrary, my fear is that I am miserably and shamefully 
deficient in that quality as regards action. The palsy of doubt 
and distraction hangs like some guilty weight of dark unfathomed 
remembrances upon my energies when the signal is flying for 
action. But, on the other hand, this accursed gift I have, as 
regards thought, that in the first step towards the possibility of a 
misfortune I see its total evolution ; in the radix of the series I 
see too certainly and too instantly its entire expansion ; in the 
first syllable of the dreadful sentence I read already the last. It 
was not that I feared for ourselves. Us our bulk and impetus 
charmed against peril in any collision. And I had ridden through 
too many hundreds of perils that were frightful to approach, that 
were matter of laughter to look back upon, the first face of which 



THOMAS DE QUINCE Y 449 

was horror, the parting face a jest — for any anxiety to rest upon 
our interests. The mail was not built, I felt assured, nor bespoke, 
that could betray me who trusted to its protection. But any car- 
riage that we could meet would be frail and light in comparison 
of ourselves. And I remarked this ominous accident of our situa- 
tion, — we were on the wrong side of the road. But then, it may 
be said, the other party, if other there was, might also be on the 
wrong side ; and two wrongs might make a right. That was not 
likely. The same motive which had drawn us to the right-hand 
side of the road — viz., the luxury of the soft beaten sand as con- 
trasted with the paved centre — would prove attractive to others. 
The two adverse carriages would therefore, to a certainty, be 
travelling on the same side ; and from this side, as not being ours 
in law, the crossing over to the other would, of course, be looked 
for from us} Our lamps, still lighted, would give the impression 
of vigilance on our part. And every creature that met us would 
rely upon us for quartering.^ All this, and if the separate links of 
the anticipation had been a thousand times more, I saw, not dis- 
cursively, or by effort, or by succession, but by one flash of horrid 
simultaneous intuition. 

Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the evil which 
might be gathering ahead, ah ! what a sullen mystery of fear, what 
a sigh of woe, was that which stole upon the air, as again the far- 
off sound of a wheel was heard ! A whisper it was — a whisper 
from, perhaps, four miles off — secretly announcing a ruin that, 
being foreseen, was not the less inevitable ; that, being known, 
was not therefore healed. What could be done — who was it that 
could do it — to check the storm-flight of these maniacal horses ? 
Could I not seize the reins from the grasp of the slumbering 
coachman? You, reader, think that it would have been in your 
power to do so. And I quarrel not with your estimate of your- 
self. But, from the way in which the coachman's hand was viced 

1 It is true that, according to the law of the case as established by legal prece- 
dents, all carriages were required to give way before royal equipages, and there- 
fore before the mail as one of them. But this only increased the danger, as being 
a regulation very imperfectly made known, very unequally enforced, and therefore 
often embarrassing the movements on both sides. 

■■^ " Quartering" : — This is the technical word, and, I presume, derived from the 
French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle, 
2G 



450 THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

between his upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. Easy was 
it? See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. The cruel rider 
has kept the bit in his horse's mouth for two centuries. Unbridle 
him for a minute, if you please, and wash his mouth with water. 
Easy was it ? Unhorse me, then, that imperial rider ; knock me 
those marble feet from those marble stirrups of Charlemagne. 

The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now too clearly the 
sounds of wheels. Who and what could it be ? Was it industry 
in a taxed cart? Was it youthful gaiety in a gig? Was it sorrow 
that loitered, or joy that raced? For as yet the snatches of sound 
were too intermitting, from distance, to decipher the character of 
the motion. Whoever were the travellers, something must be 
done to warn them. Upon the other party rests the active 
responsibility, but upon us — and, woe is me ! that us was reduced 
to my frail opium-shattered self — rests the responsibility of warn- 
ing. Yet, how should this be accomplished ? Might I not sound 
the guard's horn ? Already, on the first thought, I was making my 
way over the roof of the guard's seat. But this, from the accident 
which I have mentioned, of the foreign mails being piled upon the 
roof, was a difficult and even dangerous attempt to one cramped 
by nearly three hundred miles of outside travelling. And, fortu- 
nately, before I had lost much time in the attempt, our frantic 
horses swept round an angle of the road which opened upon us 
that final stage where the collision must be accomplished and the 
catastrophe sealed. All was apparently finished. The court was 
sitting ; the case was heard ; the judge had finished ; and only 
the verdict was yet in arrear. 

Before us lay an avenue straight as an arrow, six hundred yards, 
perhaps, in length ; and the umbrageous trees, which rose in a 
regular line from either side, meeting high overhead, gave to it the 
character of a cathedral aisle. These trees lent a deeper solem- 
nity to the early light ; but there was still light enough to perceive, 
at the further end of this Gothic aisle, a frail reedy gig, in which 
were seated a young man, and by his side a young lady. Ah, 
young sir ! what are you about? If it is requisite that you should 
whisper your communications to this young lady — though really I 
see nobody, at an hour and on a road so solitary, likely to over- 
hear you — is it therefore requisite that you should carry your lips 



THOMAS DE QUINCE Y 45 1 ' 

forward to hers? The Mttle carriage is creeping on at one mile an 
hour ; and the parties within it, being thus tenderly engaged, are 
naturally bending down their heads. Between them and eternity, 
to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a half. Oh 
heavens! what is it that I shall do? Speaking or acting, what 
help can I offer? Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale 
might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the 
I/iad to prompt the sole resource that remained. Yet so it was. 
Suddenly I remembered the shout of Achilles, and its effect. But 
could I pretend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas? 
No : but then I needed not the shout that should alarm all Asia 
militant ; such a shout would suffice as might carry terror into 
the hearts of two thoughtless young people and one gig-horse. I 
shouted — and the young man heard me not. A second time I 
shouted — and now he heard me, for now he raised his head. 

Here, then, all had been done that, by me, could be done ; 
more on my part was not possible. Mine had been the first 
step ; the second was for the young man ; the third was for God. 
If, said I, this stranger is a brave man, and if indeed he loves 
the young girl at his side — or, loving her not, if he feels the 
obligation, pressing upon every man worthy to be called a man, 
of doing his utmost for a woman confided to his protection — 
he will at least make some effort to save her. If that fails, he 
will not perish the more, or by a death more cruel, for having 
made it ; and he will die as a brave man should, with his face to 
the danger, and with his arm about the woman that he sought in 
vain to save. But, if he makes no effort, — shrinking without a 
struggle from his duty, — he himself will not the less certainly 
perish for this baseness of poltroonery. He will die no less : and 
why not? Wherefore should we grieve that there is one craven 
less in the world ? No ; kt him perish, without a pitying thought 
of ours wasted upon him ; and, in that case, all our grief will be 
reserved for the fate of the helpless girl who now, upon the least 
shadow of failure in hitn, must by the fiercest of translations — 
must without time for a prayer — must within seventy seconds — 
stand before the judgment-seat of God. 

But craven he was not : sudden had been the call upon him, 
and sudden was his answer to the call. He saw, he heard, he com- 



452 THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

prehended, the ruin that was coming down : already its gloomy 
shadow darkened above him ; and already he was measuring his 
strength to deal with it. Ah ! what a vulgar thing does courage 
seem when we see nations buying it and selling it for a shilling 
a-day : ah ! what a sublime thing does courage seem when some 
fearful summons on the great deeps of life carries a man, as if 
running before a hurricane, up to the giddy crest of some tumultu- 
ous crisis from which he two courses, and a voice says to him 
audibly, " One way lies hope ; take the other, and mourn for 
ever ! " How grand a triumph if, even then, amidst the raving 
of all around him, and the frenzy of the danger, the man is able 
to confront his situation — is able to retire for a moment into 
sohtude with God, and to seek his counsel from Him ! 

For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the stranger 
settled his countenance steadfastly upon us, as if to search and 
value every element in the conflict before him. For five seconds 
more of his seventy he sat immovably, like one that mused on 
some great purpose. For five more, perhaps, he sat with eyes 
upraised, like one that prayed in sorrow, under some extremity 
of doubt, for light that should guide him to the better choice. 
Then suddenly he rose ; stood upright ; and, by a powerful strain 
upon the reins, raising his horse's fore-feet from the ground, he 
slewed him round on the pivot of his hind-legs, so as to plant 
the little equipage in a position nearly at right angles to ours. 
Thus far his condition was not improved ; except as a first step 
had been taken towards the possibility of a second. If no more 
were done, nothing was done ; for the little carriage still occupied 
the very centre of our path, though in an altered direction. Yet 
even now it may not be too late : fifteen of the seventy seconds 
may still be unexhausted ; and one almighty bound may avail to clear 
the ground. Hurry, then, hurry! for the flying moments — they 
hurry. Oh, hurry, hurry, my brave young man ! for the cruel hoofs 
of our horses — they also hurry ! Fast are the flying moments, 
faster are the hoofs of our horses. But fear not for him, if human 
energy can suffice ; faithful was he that drove to his terrific duty ; 
faithful was the horse to his command. One blow, one impulse 
given with voice and hand, by the stranger, one rush from the 
horse, one bound as if in the act of rising to a fence, landed the 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 453 

docile creature's fore-feet upon the crown or arching centre of 
the road. The larger half of the little equipage had then cleared 
our over-towering shadow : that was evident even to my own agi- 
tated sight. But it mattered little that one wreck should float off in 
safety if upon the wreck that perished were embarked the human 
freightage. The rear part of the carriage — was that certainly be- 
yond the line of absolute ruin? What power could answer the ques- 
tion? Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which of 
these had speed enough to sweep between the question and the 
answer, and divide the one from the other? Light does not tread 
upon the steps of light more indivisibly than did our all-conquer- 
ing arrival upon the escaping efforts of the gig. That must the 
young man have felt too plainly. His back was now turned to us ; 
not by sight could he any longer communicate with the peril ; but, 
by the dreadful rattle of our harness, too truly had his ear been 
instructed that all was finished as regarded any effort of his. Al- 
ready in resignation he had rested from his struggle ; and perhaps 
in his heart he was whispering, " Father, which art in heaven, do 
Thou finish above what I on earth have attempted." Faster than 
ever mill-race we ran past them in our inexorable flight. Oh, 
raving of hurricanes that must have sounded in their young ears 
at the moment of our transit ! Even in that moment the thunder 
of collision spoke aloud. Either with the swingle-bar, or with the 
haunch of our near leader, we had struck the off-wheel of the little 
gig ; which stood rather obliquely, and not quite so far advanced 
as to be accurately parallel with the near-wheel. The blow, from 
the fury of our passage, resounded terrifically. I rose in horror, to 
gaze upon the ruins we might have caused. From my elevated 
station I looked down, and looked back upon the scene ; which 
in a moment told its own tale, and wrote all its records on my 
heart for ever. 

Here was the map of the passion that now had finished. The 
horse was planted immovably, with his fore-feet upon the paved 
crest of the central road. He of the whole party might be sup- 
posed untouched by the passion of death. The little cany car- 
riage — partly, perhaps, from the violent torsion of the wheels in 
its recent movement, partly from the thundering blow we had given 
to it — as if it sympathised with human horror, was all alive with 



454 "^^^ VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

tremblings and shiverings. The young man trembled not, nor 
shivered. He sat like a rock. But his was the steadiness of agi- 
tation frozen into rest by horror. As yet he dared not to look 
round ; for he knew that, if anything remained to do, by him it 
could no longer be done. And as yet he knew not for certain if 
their safety were accompHshed. But the lady 

But the lady ! Oh, heavens ! will that spectacle ever depart 

from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and 
rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some vision- 
ary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing? Fig- 
ure to yourself, reader, the elements of the case ; suffer me to 
recall before your mind the circumstances of that unparalleled 
situation. From the silence and deep peace of this saintly sum- 
mer night — from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, 
dawnhght, dreamlight — from the manly tenderness of this flatter- 
ing, whispering, murmuring love — suddenly as from the woods 
and fields — suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in 
revelation — suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, 
leaped upon her, with the flashing of cataracts. Death the crowned 
phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of 
his voice. 

The moments were numbered ; the strife was finished ; the 
vision was closed. In the twinkling of an eye, our flying horses 
had carried us to the termination of the umbrageous aisle ; at the 
right angles we wheeled into our former direction ; the turn of the 
road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it 
into my dreams for ever. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 455 

AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
[From Virginibus Ptierisque and Other Papers, 1881.] 

" BosWELL : We grow weary when idle." 

"Johnson : That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company; but 
if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all entertain 
one another." 

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in 
absence convicting them of /i?j"^-respectabiHty, to enter on some 
lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far 
short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are con- 
tent when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the 
mean while, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet 
this should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in 
doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the 
dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to 
state its position as industry itself It is admitted that the pres- 
ence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for 
sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for 
those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his deter- 
mination, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic American- 
ism, " goes for " them. And while such an one is ploughing 
distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resent- 
ment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the way- 
side, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their 
elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the dis- 
regard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome 
for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate-house, 
and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? 
It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous 
hill-tops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your 
achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical ; finan- 
ciers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of 
stocks ; literary persons despise the unlettered \ and people of all 
pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. 



456 _ AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the 
greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against in- 
dustry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. 
The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well ; 
therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain 
that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence ; only 
there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the 
present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not 
necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a 
book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason why he should never 
have been to Richmond. 

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal 
idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may 
escape from school honours with all his wits about him, most boys 
pay so dear for their medals that they never afterwards have a 
shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same 
holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffers 
others to educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gen- 
tleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words : " Young 
man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowl- 
edge ; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring 
upon books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman 
seems to have been unaware that many other things besides read- 
ing grow irksome, and not a few become impossible, by the time 
a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a stick. 
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty 
bloodless substitute for Hfe. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady 
of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the 
bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as 
the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought. 

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not 
be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret ; 
you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep 
and waking in the class. For my own part, I have attended a 
good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spin- 
ning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that 
Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though 
I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 457 

the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I 
came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is 
not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education which 
was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out 
yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of 
Life. Suffice it to say this : if a lad does not learn in the streets, 
it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant al- 
ways in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gar- 
dened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of 
lilacs over a burn, and smoke estimable pipes to the tune of the 
water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there 
he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new 
perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is? We may 
conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the 
conversation that should thereupon ensue : — 

"How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?" 

" Truly, sir, I take mine ease." 

"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be 
plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain 
knowledge?" 

" Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave." 

" Learning, quotha ! After what fashion, I pray thee ? Is it 
mathematics? " 

" No, to be sure." 

" Is it metaphysics? " 

"Nor that." 

" Is it some language?" 

" Nay, it is no language." 

"Is it a trade?" 

" Nor a trade neither." 

"Why, then, what is't?" 

" Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pil- 
grimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons 
in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the 
Road ; as also, what manner of Staff is of the best service. More- 
over, I lie here, by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson 
which my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment." 

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with 



458 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance, 
broke forth upon this wise : " Learning, quotha ! " said he ; "I 
would have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman ! " 

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle 
of starch, like a turkey when it spreads its feathers. 

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. A fact is 
not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of 
your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowl- 
edged direction, with a name to go by ; or else you are not inquir- 
ing at all, only lounging ; and the workhouse is too good for you. 
It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the 
far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to 
regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study 
for a few years ere we go hence ; and it seemed all one to him 
whether you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential 
calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play 
in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, look- 
ing out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his 
face all the time, will get more true education than many another 
in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid 
knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious 
science ; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of look- 
ing, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. 
While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one- 
half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant 
may learn some really useful art : to play the fiddle, to know a good 
cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. 
Many who have " plied their book diligently," and know all about 
some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study 
with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, 
and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many 
make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically 
stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who be- 
gan hfe along with them — by your leave, a different picture. He 
has had time to take care of his health and his spirits ; he has 
been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of 
all things for both body and mind ; and if he has never read the 
great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 459 

skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student 
afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his 
half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, 
and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more 
important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has 
much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in 
their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indul- 
gence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will 
have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and 
opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify 
himself with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him along 
a by-road not much frequented, but very even and pleasant, which 
is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Com- 
mon-sense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very 
noble prospect ; and while others behold the East and West, the 
Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of 
morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows 
running speedily and in many different directions into the great 
daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill 
doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and 
emptiness ; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the 
Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape ; many 
firelit parlours ; good people laughing, drinking, and making love 
as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution ; and the 
old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn. 

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, 
is a symptom of deficient vitality ; and a faculty for idleness imphes 
a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There 
is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely 
conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional 
occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them 
aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their 
study. They have no curiosity ; they cannot give themselves over 
to random provocations ; they do not take pleasure in the exercise 
of their faculties for its own sake ; and unless Necessity lays about 
them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speak- 
ing to such folk : they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous 
enough ; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are 



460 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do 
not require to go to the ofifice, when they are not hungry and have 
no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. 
If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a 
stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would sup- 
pose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with ; you 
would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated ; and yet very 
possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good 
eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have 
been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on 
the medal ; they have gone about in the world and mixed with 
clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own 
affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they 
have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no 
play ; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind 
vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub 
against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was 
breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes ; when he was 
twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is 
smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt up- 
right upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal 
to me as being Success in Life. 

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy 
habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and 
down to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an 
omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is 
only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. 
And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the 
most important thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate it 
will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most 
beneficent parts that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life 
are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at 
large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the 
walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in 
the orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from 
the benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices tow- 
ards the general result. You are no doubt very dependent on 
the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signal- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 461 

men who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the police- 
men who walk the streets for your protection ; but is there not a 
thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors 
who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your 
dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose 
his friend's money ; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing 
shirts ; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. 
Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I 
think I could name one or two long- faced Barabbases whom the 
world could better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he 
was more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had never done 
him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle of 
ostentatious friends ; for he thought a good companion emphati- 
cally the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the 
world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done 
them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish dis- 
position. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered 
with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour 
pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his ; do you 
think the service would be greater, if he had made the manuscript 
in his heart's blood, like a compact with the devil; do you 
really fancy you should be more beholden to your correspondent, 
if he had been damning you all the while for your importunity? 
Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because, like the quality 
of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest. There 
must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a jest ; 
but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is con- 
ferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with con- 
fusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of 
being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon 
the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they 
are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The 
other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a 
marble, with so jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a 
good humour ; one of these persons, who had been delivered from 
more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and 
gave him some money with this remark : '' You see what some- 
times comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased before, 



462 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

he had now to look both pleased and mystified. For ray part, I 
justify this encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children ; 
I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage ; but 
I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A 
happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound 
note. He or she is a radiating focus of good-will ; and their en- 
trance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. 
We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh 
proposition ; they do a better thing than that, they practically 
demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Con- 
sequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, 
idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept ; but, thanks 
to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused ; and 
within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths 
in the whole Body of Morality. Look at one of your industrious 
fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps 
indigestion ; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and re- 
ceives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either 
he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse 
in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot ; or he 
comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his 
whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns 
to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this 
fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be 
happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his ser- 
vices in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his frac- 
tious spirits. He poisons Ufe at the well-head. It is better to be 
beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag- 
ridden by a -peevish uncle. 

And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what 
cause do they embitter their own and other people's lives ? That 
a man 'should publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should 
finish or not finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of 
little interest to the world. The ranks of life are full ; and al- 
though a thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. 
When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding 
women's work, she answered there were plenty to spin and wash. 
And so, even with your own rare gifts ! When nature is " so care- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 463 

less of the single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the 
fancy that our own is of exceptional importance ? Suppose Shake- 
speare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir 
Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better 
or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and 
the student to his book ; and no one been any the wiser of the 
loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the alterna- 
tive all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a 
man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the 
proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon 
consideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory in the 
phrase ; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the quali- 
ties necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in them- 
selves. Alas and alas ! you may take it how you will, but the 
services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just 
a gentleman with a protracted nightmare ! And yet you see mer- 
chants who go and labour themselves into a great fortune and 
thence into the bankruptcy court ; scribblers who keep scribbling 
at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about 
them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin 
instead of a pyramid ; and fine young men who work themselves 
into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes 
upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whis- 
pered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some 
momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they 
play their farces was the bull's-eye and centre-point of all the uni- 
verse ? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away 
their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurt- 
ful ; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find 
them indifferent ; and they and the world they inhabit are so in- 
considerable that the mind freezes at the thought. 



NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

The following questions and exercises, placed here to aid teachers and 
students, are not exhaustive, but merely suggestive of interesting and charac- 
teristic points for discussion. Taken together, they illustrate a fairly complete 
theory of the main principles of description, narration, exposition, and, in a 
lesser degree, of argumentation, persuasion, and style. 

Gibbon: Byzantiiun. — This passage from the Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire is a classical illustration of systematic description of a large 
tract of country. In substance, it brings out the prominent landmarks of the 
famous region with which it deals, and appeals to historical associations. In 
method, it works with an orderly ground plan, dwelling first, and with consid- 
erable detail, on the surroundings of Byzantium, and then passing to the more 
remote regions; and it makes use of the so-called "fundamental image." 

I. Why should Byzantium deserve so formal and elaborate a description as 
that which Gibbon has given? What is its place in the history? 2. Of what 
descriptive and suggestive value are the mythical, legendary, and historical 
references? 3. What order does Gibbon follow in his description? What is 
his plan? Draw up a sketch of the place and compare it with a map. Does 
his object seem to be to give a general impression of the region and its associa- 
tions, or to furnish accurate and detailed topographical information? 4. Are 
you acquainted with other descriptions of the same general sort? Write a 
short description of this kind, dealing with some familiar region or locality of 
special importance. 

Whitney: The Yosemite Valley. — Professor Whitney's account of the 
Yosemite Valley is an unusually good example of orderly description, written 
with considerable detail, of the main features of a famous landscape. The 
description brings out the arrangement and dimensions of the valley, the nature 
of its most impressive phenomena, and certain of the general characteristics 
which make it remarkable. In method, the passage is merely orderly progres- 
sion from one point to another until the chief features have been enumerated. 
In style, it is matter-of-fact, and makes very little attempt to appeal to the 
emotions. The selection as originally published was accompanied by a map; 
this it does not seem necessary to reproduce here, because similar maps are 
easily accessible in such books as Baedeker's United States, and because the 
descriptiot\ is so admirably planned that such reference is scarcely necessary. 
If the reader will draw a rough parallelogram, extending a little north of east 
and south of west, with the Merced River running somewhat south of west 
2 H 465 



466 NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

through the middle of the figure, and imagine himself entering the valley from 
the lower right-hand corner, he will find that he can place for himself the chief 
points indicated. 

I. What does the first paragraph indicate with regard to the point of view 
of the selection? What does the last tell of its nature? 2. Compare the de- 
scription with that of Byzantium. What differences are to be noted in the 
extent of country; in the method of progression used? Which is the more like 
a map? Could the methods be exchanged with success? What elements does 
Gibbon add which are not geographical? What does one find in the descrip- 
tion of Yosemite which is not geographical or topographical? Does Whitney 
use a " fundamental image " ? 3. In what other ways might this description 
have been treated, as a panorama from one point, as on a particular occasion, 
or from the point of view of a particular person? Write parts of short descrip- 
tions of the Yosemite or other places, embodying these differences. 

Poe : Landor^s Cottage. — Landor^s Cottage describes an imaginary scene 
with much explicitness. It narrates the manner in which the author came to 
the coign of vantage whence he beheld the view described in the present 
selection; thence he goes on to relate how he approached and entered the 
house, and to describe the interior and the occupants. The passage is an 
admirable example of exact description, and is a fine instance of the carefully 
controlled imagination of Poe's best writing. 

I. From what point of view is the description made ? By what method 
does Poe go from one object to another ? What is the total effect of the 
picture he presents ? 2. Make a plan of the house and the grounds from 
the description Poe has given. 3. Describe the interior of the house and 
the occupants as you imagine them to be, that is, in keeping with the present 
extract. Compare the result with the original. 4. Write a composition 
describing with as much exactness as possible some scene with which you are 
familiar. Make a map from your description, in order that you may see if 
you have treated any details inexactly or inadequately. Write a sketch of an 
imaginary landscape to bring out a special quality. 5. Why do you suppose 
that Poe chose the name Lander? 6. Point out in Poe's work other 
instances of this accurate, explicit writing, as in the Domain of Arttheitn, or, 
more incidentally, in The Fall of the House of Usher. 

Ruskin : St. Mark''s. — Ruskin's famous description is a good example of 
work of the more elaborately impressionistic sort ; he wishes to show the 
reader how the building strikes the eye of the beholder as he first sees it 
bursting upon his vision. In method, Ruskin works here by contrasts — 
between the English cathedral and St. Mark's, and between the surroundings 
of each cathedral and the building itself. In style, there is an accumulation 
of specific, occasionally quasi-technical, details, but all these are chosen for 
their picturesque effect. 

I. What do the first and the last paragraphs tell with regard to the author 
of the description ? How is the point of view kept throughout ? 2. What 
is the impression made by each paragraph ? On what kind of descriptive 



NOTES AND QUESTIONS ^67 

detail is each of these impressions founded ? Do you gain an exact idea 
of size, dimensions, etc. ? Compare the piece in these respects with Poe's 
Lander's Cottage. Contrast the purposes of this description with those of 
Gibbon, Whitney, and Foe in the preceding selections. 

Hudson : The Plains of Patagonia. — This passage differs from those which 
have preceded it in the present volume in that it describes the plains quite as 
much by the effect they produce on the author as by the enumeration of 
details, by a careful plan, as was the case in the first three selections, or by 
contrasts and effects of an objective sort, as in Ruskin's description of St. 
Mark's cathedral. General characteristics are, to be sure, to be noted, as the 
constant tone of grayness in the landscape ; but the effect of the scene on the 
writer and the causes of it are what he is chiefly concerned with. 

I. What objects, colors, forms, and sounds does the author enumerate as 
characteristic of the plains of Patagonia ? How do these compare in copi- 
ousness with the details of the preceding selections ? On what does he lay 
special stress ? 2. What is the prevailing impression given by the descrip- 
tion of the plains, apart from the effect on the author ? 3. What is the 
effect of these objects on the observer ? How does he present this effect ? 
Does he convey a powerful impression ? 4. Write a description aiming to 
give an impression of a peculiar and personal kind. 

Borrow : The World's End. — Sorrow's description, though dwelling on 
what may be called the general impression of Cape Finisterre, is concerned 
chiefly with the particular aspect which a sublime spectacle presented to his 
eye. As the narrative progresses, there appears more and more conspicuously 
the World's End, and finally it becomes the centre of the reader's interest. 

I. What is the final and total impression made by Borrow's description? 
To what facts and by what methods does he appeal to the reader? What 
part, if any, do the people whom he meets play in the description? Compare 
the situation, in these respects, with the preceding descriptions. 2. What 
differences in treatment would have resulted had Borrow employed the 
methods used by Gibbon? by Whitney? by Poe? by Ruskin ? by Hudson? 
In which of all the descriptions given so far in this volume does the author's 
personality play the greatest part? In which is narrative the most prominent? 

Kipling: Wee Willie Winkie. — This is one of Mr. Kipling's stories of 
the class which deal with British life in India. It attempts to bring out one 
character in one main situation. 

I. What is the purpose of the tale? What traits in the character of the 
young hero does Mr. Kipling bring out? Does he do this by indication or 
by suggestion? How much has the hero's childish speech to do with the im- 
pression? Are the other characters individualized? 2. Can the narrative be 
called "realistic "? 

Poe: The Cask of Amontillado. — This story is characteristic of Poe in 
that he sets before himself certain premises or problems — here the desire 
for revenge — and works from these to a complete denouement. The story 
is without moral purpose; it is a purely intellectual handling of the motives 



468 NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

of which Poe assumes the existence. The amount of dialogue, considering 
the length of the story, is remarkable. 

I. What is the central problem which the author places before himself? 
In what paragraphs is this set forth? Why are those motives necessary to 
the ending? From that ending work backwards to see just how Poe has 
arrived there. How has he made the extraordinary scene of the immolation 
plausible? Where does the action proper begin? What new elements of 
time, place, and circumstance are added as the situation develops? Explain 
how Fortunato is tempted to his doom. Of what value is the episode of 
the trowel? How does the dialogue help the story? 2. In what way are the 
paragraphs after the words, " I began to wall up the niche," necessary to the 
completion of the story? 3. Can the story be called "realistic"? Of what 
importance are the local allusions? 4. Compare this story in structure with 
other tales of Poe of the same type, as The Black Cat and The Pit and the 
Pendiilnin, with a view to showing Poe's handling of incident and situation, 
his climax, and the elements which go to make up the type. How does this 
type differ from that of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red 
Death, and Ligeia? How from that of The Gold-Bug and The Purloined 
Letter? What is common to both the types ? 

Hawthorne : Ethan Brand. — The story is typical of many of Hawthorne's 
tales, as The Ambitious Guest, The Great Carbuncle, The Great Stone Pace, 
and Dr. Heidegger'' s Experiment, and presents in a shorter form the same kind 
of problem that one finds in his longer works. The scene is hardly so local 
here as in the novels; the mention of Greylock and the lime-kilns, however, 
place it in north-western Massachusetts, and several of the characters are 
common types in New England. The tale, unlike Poe's The Cask of Amon- 
tillado, is very moral and is strongly allegorical in cast. 

I. What is the purpose of the story? Does the tale have to do with events 
and characters of merely external interest, or does it use these events and 
characters as representative of the inner life ? 2. What does Ethan Brand 
represent ? What part do Bartram, Joe, the stage-agent, Giles, the Doctor, 
and the younger members of the crowd play in the story ? What is the func- 
tion of the German Jew with respect to the allegory ? What signifies the 
episode of the dog ? Account for the description on the morning after the catas- 
trophe. Make a summary of this story, so as to bring out the main elements 
in a more literal language and manner than Hawthorne has done. 3. From 
what point of view is the story told ? Compare it with the two preceding 
selections. Compare the story with other allegories with which you are famil- 
iar, in Hawthorne and elsewhere. Make some general classification of Haw- 
thorne's stories. 

Stevenson: Markheim. — Markkeim belongs to that class of Stevenson's 
work of which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the best known example, but of 
which itself and Will 0' the AIill3.re perhaps quite as good specimens. These 
three tales, hke Hawthorne's, are successful attempts to personify in the pictu- 
resque forms of life a struggle which goes on in the soul of man and which is 



NOTES AND QUESTIONS 469 

more commonly treated by analytic and expository methods, as in George Eliot's 
novels. Traces of the same sort of characterization may be found in some of 
Stevenson's later and longer stories, like IVie Master of Ballantrae, in which 
the chief figure, liesides being an individual, is depicted as a type of unrelieved 
evil, an incarnate spirit of malice which blights everything it lays hand on. 
Such stories are embodiments of a moral, as Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is 
the embodiment of a fanciful, world. 

I. Wherein lies the central interest of the story ? Is it in the details of the 
murder, the ensuing search for the money, the self-surrender of the murderer; 
or does it lie in the moral and intellectual processes through which the chief 
character passes ? Note the ending. 2. What, in the theme of the story, is 
the function of the various incidents, the presence of so many clocks, the in- 
terruptions, the examination by Markheim of the body of his victim, the 
changed mood of Markheim, as he is searching for the money, and the op- 
position of the "better self" ? Do these work to a climax? If so, how? 
3. In point of style, what should you say were some of the chief features ? 
What impression does each narrative paragraph convey ? From what point 
of view is it written ? 4. Compare the story in purpose and method with 
Ethan Brand and The Cask of Amontillado. In what other works of Steven- 
son, beside those mentioned above, do you find the idealistic elements ? 

Garland : Among the Corn-roivs. — The descriptive part of the story from 
which this selection is taken are, though subordinate, of much importance in 
that they supply much of the motive for the denouement, and are of themselves 
notable examples of " local color " ; they attempt, that is, to show, in full 
reality, the characteristic sights and sounds of the situation. All go to make 
the story a vivid picture. 

I. What is the total effect produced by the descriptive parts of the passage? 
Describe in a few words the sort of place where the events happen. 2. To 
what senses does the description make appeal ? How far do the sights and 
sounds seem characteristic ? 3. Examine in some detail the verbs, adjectives, 
and nouns to note their specificness. 4. Take the same setting and suggest 
other incidents which will fit it. 5. Write a story employing " local color." 

Allen: 77^1? Lad in the Hemp-field. — This selection, like the preceding, 
illustrates " local color." It differs from the former in that it lays rather more 
stress on the mental state of the chief character. It is analytical as well as 
picturesque. 

I. What is the purpose of the narrative ? What is the centre of interest ? 
How far may the aspiration of the hero be regarded as more fitting to one 
type of American, in one locality, than another ? 2. What descriptive facts 
do you note ? How much of the selection is analysis? To what degree may 
the detail be said to add "local color" to the scene and the analysis? 3. Is 
the sketch in any respect conventional? In what respects original? In what 
of universal interest? 

Hewlett: The Miracle of the Peach Tree. — ^ix. Hewlett, in the story 
from which this selection is made, attempts to convey the picture of a simple, 



470 NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

far-off, credulous community. The present passage relates a very simple hap- 
pening, and aims to present the atmosphere of appropriate surroundings for 
the event. 

I. Tell the story briefly and literally. What does Mr. Hewlett add to 
this narrative? On what kind of facts does he dwell? What is the impres- 
sion of the scene as a whole? Of the actors in the tale? 2. Examine the 
style of the passage to note the quality of the writing, and the kind of sen- 
tences, etc., which Mr. Hewlett employs. 

London : A Dog and His Master. — This passage, while containing touches 
of local life, is remarkable chiefly as a vivid piece of narrative, in which a 
dog's character is sympathetically handled. A few episodes bring out a few 
traits, which are in turn subordinated to one main trait — the devotion of the 
animal to his master. 

I. What is the chief purpose of the story? Has it any minor aims? 2. In 
what ways is the dog's character brought out in direct narration? In what 
ways by suggestion of effect? 3. How far is description used? To what 
extent is this deliberately "local" in purpose? 

Scott : 77/1? Combat in the Desert. — This piece of narrative is character- 
istic of Scott in that it introduces the action by a formal, elaborate, syste- 
matic piece of description, narrates the events with equal deliberation and 
gorgeousness, and brings the incident to a close, though preparing the way 
for another interesting scene. The scenic character of the extract is perhaps 
more typical of Scott's stories of the crusaders than of his novels dealing 
with Scottish life, but it is very common in his writing. The most familiar 
examples occur in Ivanhoe, which is scarcely more than a succession of scenes, 
of which the tournament atAshby and the storming of Torquilstone are per- 
haps the most famous. 

I . To what facts does Scott make appeal in order to render the scene impres- 
sive? How are these arranged to bring out the central interest? 2. What 
should you say of Scott's style with regard to its rhythm and cadence as bear- 
ing on the main effect ? 3. If you have not read The Talisman, write a 
scene in continuation of the present and compare it with chapter ii. in Scott's 
novel. 

Dickens : David and the Ark. — The passage is a good illustration of the 
sympathetic pictures of life which abound in Dickens's work; it is not gro- 
tesquely comic like much in Pickwick Papers, or polemic against social abuses 
as are many passages in Oliver Tivist and Nicholas AHcklehy, or replete with 
rhetorical pathos as are the chapters describing the death of Paul Dombey or 
Little Nell. It pictures the class of persons which Dickens drew best, simple, 
homely, kindly people, and it pictures them in a measure typical of the author, 
that is, by a few descriptive touches and by characteristic words and acts. 
The characters, like most of those of Dickens, are individual creations, and 
are not usually to be regarded as types, except so far as subsequent custom 
may have made them so. 

I. Are the characters in the selection simple or complex ? What are the 



NOTES AND QUESTIONS 47 1 

chief traits of each ? By what method does Dickens fix each person in the 
mind of the reader ? In other words, what acts or words do we associate 
with each ? 2. In the purely descriptive passages, what method does 
Dickens pursue ? How does his description compare in formality and system 
with that of Scott ? 3. Wherein does the humor of the passage lie ? 
Wherein its pathos, if any ? What is the prevailing feeling ? In what way 
is this representative of Dickens ? Cite other passages. 4. Write a narra- 
tive employing Dickens's method of bringing out character. 

Thackeray: Pendennis Falls in Love. — This passage, aside from its man- 
ner, differs from the preceding in one striking way : Pendennis, though very 
individual, is represented also as a type of the sentimental, callow youth, 
just as Foker stands for a type of the callow, good-humored young man of the 
world. This classical quality which gives to the experiences of individuals a 
value which may be called universal, or at least national, is one of the dis- 
tinguishing marks of Thackeray's genius, and lies at the basis of his interest in 
human personality. 

I. Tell the story in brief, simply with a view to stating the main facts. 
What, in addition to these facts, does Thackeray give which makes the char- 
acters seem like human beings ? In what respects may their actions and 
words be taken as representing types rather than individuals ? 2. Describe 
the character of Pendennis; of Foker; of Miss Fotheringay. What is your 
impression of their amiability ? Of their naturalness and humanity ? 
3. What is the quality of Thackeray's humor as revealed in this passage ? 
Does it bear out the common assertion that Thackeray is " cynical " ? 4. How 
far does Thackeray analyze motives and states of mind ? How far is his view 
that of an observer of the outer, so to speak, or of the inner man ? Are we 
told directly of motives, or do we infer them from the effects ? 5. How far 
are these methods characteristic of Thackeray ? 6. Write a character sketch 
of some person with whom you are acquainted, trying to picture him as an 
individual and as a type. 

George Eliot : A Voice fron the Past. — This characteristic passage differs 
chiefly from those which have preceded it in that it deals with a mental struggle 
rather than a material picture or a physical effect. The heroine is represented 
as passing through a spiritual crisis which is analyzed in its diverse stages and 
which leaves her changed. Like most of the author's work, it is psychological 
rather than picturesque. 

I. What stages does Maggie pass through in her reflections on the trouble 
into which her family has fallen ? Explain her character at the beginning 
and at the end of the passage. What changes have taken place ? 2. In 
the main, to what type of person does Maggie belong spiritually ? Is she 
represented typically as well as individually ? Do you get a clear notion of 
her personality as well as of her character ? 3. If a type, is the type, in 
your experience, at all common ? Do people as you know them experience 
such crises ? Point out other types in George Eliot's work. Do such states 
of mind commonly appeal to ordinary observers ? In general, what is your 



472 NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

view of the profundity and originality of George Eliot's comments on people ? 
What other methods does she employ in characterization ? 4. Write an 
analysis of some character with which you have acquaintance. 

Meredith : An Impetuous Lover. — The selection from Beattchamp's Career 
is one of the many dramatic selections which one finds in the works of Mere- 
dith, and is one of the most dramatic to be found in them, or, indeed, in any 
English fiction. Few pieces are more striking than this in manner, in critical 
insight, and in acuteness of analysis of character. 

I. Describe in your own words the traits in each of the characters 
introduced. How do these characters, including the Marquis, react on one 
another to produce the situation? What is the crisis? Is it spiritual or 
material? 2. What do you infer with regard to the happenings before 
this scene and with regard to the future career of the actors? In par- 
ticular, what should you say would be the career of the generous, chivalrous, 
impetuous Beauchamp? 3. Are these people interesting aside from what 
they may do in promoting an interesting situation? 4. What can you say 
of Meredith's description? 

Macaulay : The Civil War. — This passage is from the introductory part 
of Macaulay's History, and hence is less minute and circumstantial than the 
narrative after the accession of James II. Macaulay's object is merely to give 
a general and rapid survey of a period extending over about seven years, 
rather than to dwell on any particular scene, as he does in many of his narra- 
tive essays and the later parts of his history, and as is done in the historical 
selections which follow this in the present volume. 

I. What is Macaulay's purpose in this selection? On what facts does he 
dwell? How much of his narrative is concerned with specific happenings? 
How much with general motives and characteristics? What is the part of 
Cromwell in the struggle? Compare the selection with Professor Gardiner's 
account of any of these events in the History of the Great Civil War. 
2. What are the qualities of Macaulay's style? Are the divisions of his nar- 
rative plainly indicated? What are they? 3. Write a narrative in the man- 
ner of Macaulay, giving a general survey of a period. 

Parkman: Braddock's Defeat. — This narrative is at once more detailed 
and more picturesque than the preceding. Besides giving the chief causes 
and the main events which led to the opening of the campaign, the passage 
treats, in considerable minuteness, the narrative of Braddock's defeat, and 
treats it picturesquely. The present selection is followed by accounts of the 
other main events of the war, and they are treated in the same manner. The 
opening paragraphs, then, may be regarded as an introduction to these later 
campaigns as well as to that of Braddock. 

I. Where may the statement of general causes be said to end, and where 
does the particular narrative begin? 2. Indicate the places where the point 
of view or the subject of the narrative changes. Are these changes es- 
sential to making the narrative complete? 3. To what extent is description 
added to the narrative ? How does the description heighten the effect ? 



NOTES AND QUESTIONS 473 

How far does Parkman appeal to association and contrast to render his nar- 
rative impressive ? 4. What hkenesses and differences do you note be- 
tween Parkman's style and Macaulay's ? Are such differences as exist of 
sufticient moment to constitute a ditTerent type from that represented by 
Macaulay, or are their points of difference merely those of stylistic detail and 
of circumstance ? 

Carlyle : The Storming of (lie Jiastille. — Carlyle's famous narrative evi- 
dently differs from the preceding treatment of historical events in that it 
aims at the presenting of an episode rather than a general survey of events, 
and hence at greater picturesque and dramatic effect ; it attempts to depict 
human passions rather than to tell a straightforward story. Indeed, its avoid- 
ance of direct narrative or matter-of-fact explanation is remarkable. 

I. Is this scene described from the point of view of an observer of the 
spectacle or from that of the disinterested historian ? If the former, what 
are the movements of the spectator ? With which side is he sympathetic ? 
Does the point of view shift frequently ? In what ways ? 2. What is the 
general impression given by the picture ? What of each paragraph ? 
3. How is the impression of the flight of time conveyed to us ? What in 
general is the sequence of events ? 4. In style, what are the characteristic 
notes ? How do you account for the large number of short, rapid, exclama- 
tory sentences ? How for the number of French idioms literally rendered, 
as "What to do" ? 5. Point out characteristic differencesbetvveen this and 
the two preceding selections. 

Green : Queen Elizabeth. — This passage, which the author is said to have 
regarded as his most brilliant piece of work, differs from the writing which 
precedes it, in that it is almost wholly expository and contains little narrative. 
It aims not so much to give a picture as to present a character, important to 
the events which are to follow. This difference may best be explained by 
noting that whenever both Carlyle and Green deal with particular things, — 
the storming of the Bastille and Elizabeth, — the former presents the features 
of the picture only, the latter the aspects of a character only. 

I. How much narrative do you note in the selection ? How far is this 
introductory to the sketch of character, how far incidental to it ? Why is an 
exposition of Elizabeth's character important ? 2. What traits of character 
does Green bring out ? In what order are these put ? What is the chief 
trait ? How does Green work up to this in successive paragraphs? 3. Do 
any of the traits seem inconsistent with one another ? Is Green's estimate 
of Elizal)eth the same that one finds in other histories, as Froude's, or in 
novels as, say, Scott's Kenilworth? 4. Compare the method here employed 
with that of George Eliot in the analysis of Maggie TuUiver (p. 155). In 
general, do you find any correspondence between the methods of writing 
employed in fiction and in history ? Compare the narrative and historical 
extracts in this volume. 

Bryce : iVatural Characteristics as Moulding Public Opinion. — This 
chapter illustrates an interesting and important characteristic of Mr. Bryce's 



474 NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

writings — generalization from observation of social facts. Many chapters 
of The Atnerican Commonwealth are of this sort. The present chapter is 
notable for the number of these generalizations and for the system with 
which they are introduced. This system is shown in the opening sentences 
of each paragraph and in the following explanation of the meaning of each 
of these sentences, and in the more or less specific illustrations and proofs of 
the meaning which almost invariably come next. This structure is as typical 
of Mr. Bryce's work as is his generalization or as is the figure of speech with 
which he ends his chapter. 

I. Test the general observations of Mr. Bryce by your own experience. Do 
they tally in all respects with yours ? Can you add instances ? 2. Note 
the number and variety of the generalizations. Can you supply any general 
remarks about the national characteristics of Americans which Mr. Bryce has 
not made ? How are you to test the truth of your own observations ? Make 
an outline of the chapter. 3. In what respects does Mr. Bryce show that 
these characteristics mould public opinion ? Does he state his belief or 
have you to make the inferences ? If the latter, what inferences ? Write a 
short composition showing how the enumerated characteristics mould public 
opinion. 4. In point of structure, compare this chapter with others of the 
same book, as chapter 95. Analyze the structure of several paragraphs. How 
far is the structure the same in each ? Write a paragraph of the type of Mr. 
Bryce's paragraphs. 5. Compare the closing figure of speech with that in 
another chapter, as 81, with a view to determining its aptness. 

Whitney : The Foj-maiioji of the Yosemite Valley. — In comparison with 
Professor Whitney's description of the Yosemite Valley (page 5), this exposi- 
tion is interesting as an illustration of the different points of view from which 
the subject is treated. The present extract attempts merely to expound and 
support the theory that the valley is due to subsidence. This it does by 
showing that other possible theories will not account for the facts, whereas 
the theory of subsidence is in keeping with them. The selection is a good 
specimen of scientific exposition and argument. 

I. State the geological facts and principles which Professor Whitney uses, 
negatively and positively, to prove the truth of his theory. 2. On what 
other subjects might expositions dealing with the Yosemite Valley have been 
written besides those named on page 18. 3. Write an exposition in support 
of an explanation of some phenomenon, and give the causes which lead you to 
hold ypur thought to be sounder than others which might be advanced. 
4. Compare this argument with that of Matthew Arnold's essay on Gray 
(^Essays in Criticistn : Second Series). Each is a statement of the cardinal 
facts followed by an explanation of the causes of those facts ; which is the 
more thorough and why ? Can you cite other examples of the same sort of 
structure ? Compare the present selection with Tyndall's explanation of 
glaciers. 

Huxley : On a Piece of Chalk. — This classical piece of exposition and 
argument is remarkable, in structure, for its skilful passing on from simple 



NOTES AND QUESTIONS 475 

facts to more and more complex and extraordinary conclusions, and, in style, 
for its avoidance of technical and unexplained terms. It is an admirable 
model in all respects of perspicuity in presenting to an untrained audience a 
complex body of facts and conclusions. 

I. Analyze step by step the facts which Huxley states and the conclusions 
which he reaches. By what processes does he examine these initial facts ? 
What new facts does he introduce? How do they elucidate the old and reach 
out to new ideas ? What is his first point ? What ground has he travelled 
over in making it ? 2. By what method does Huxley render his exposi- 
tion attractive to his listeners ? To what associations does he appeal at the 
start ? 3. Do you note any flaws in Huxley's arguments and deductions ? 
Is his work obscure in any respects ? 4. Compare this essay in point of 
structure with that of Ruskin's The Pathetic Fallacy to note a similar process 
of reasoning. Another example is Arnold's On the Study of Celtic Literature. 
What differences do you note in the facts used ? In the cogency of reason- 
ing ? Do your conclusions suggest any generalization with regard to the 
superior definiteness and accuracy of handling of facts and conclusions in 
scientific writing ? 

Tyndall : Glacier Ice. — Tyndall here attempts to expound the processes 
by which snow is laid on high mountains and thence removed in the form of 
glaciers. This exposition deals with the changes which take place in the 
forms of the material, and it makes these clear by illustrative experiments. 
The style is simple and unadorned. The few drawings in the original text are 
omitted as not strictly necessary. 

I, Explain in your own words the changes which take place in the snow 
from the time when it falls until its conversion into the moving mass of a 
glacier. How does Tyndall show his theory to be sound? How much of his 
exposition is given to description of the phenomena? How much to illustra- 
tion and verification of his theory? 2. In what order does Tyndall treat 
his facts? Are all his points clear? Does his division of his subject into 
effects and their causes and the consequent subdivisions of the effects into 
stages or progressive processes seem appropriate? 3. Does Tyndall reach 
new and suggestive conclusions of an important sort with regard to general 
conceptions of the universe, as did Huxley in the preceding selection? 
4. Write an explanation of some process, as the circulation of the blood, or the 
function of seeing. 

Greenough and Kittredge : Learned and Popular Words. — The selection 
from Words and their Ways in English Speech exemplifies a rough but interest- 
ing classification of a large number of particular facts. It also states modern 
and reasonable views on the subject of usage. 

I. Do the authors here teach you what words to use and what to avoid, or 
do they simply classify words as they are found in speech and writing? 
2. What principles are deduced with regard to usage which would guide you 
in your choice of words? Are these principles arbitrary, or are they based on 
the phenomena presented? 3. What does the chapter gain from its wealth 



476 . NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

of illustration?' 4. Take a body of facts and separate it into groups. On 
what principle do you make your division? 5. State, in the selections from 
Green, Bryce, Whitney, Huxley, Tyndall, and the present authors, the prin- 
ciples on which the divisions are made. Are the facts classified arbitrarily, 
by functions, by progressive processes, or by other systems? Show how the 
principle of division is appropriate to the facts where it is used. In each 
instance classify the same facts by division from different points of view. 

Arnold: Sweetness atid Light. — This chapter from Culture and Anarchy 
is a famous statement of a famous point of view. It is less an argument for 
than a persuasive exposition of that view. Structurally, it amounts to an ex- 
planation of the term " culture," first somewhat abstractly and then by com- 
parison with different opinions. The style is very characteristic of the 
author. 

I. What does Arnold mean by " culture "? How is it opposed to " scien- 
tific curiosity"? What does he mean by " machinery " ? Is this a common 
conception of the term? 2. Do you gain an exact notion of what Arnold 
would have as a substitute for "machinery "? What is Arnold's conception, 
exactly, of the terms " real thought, and real beauty; real sweetness and real 
light" (p. 289)? Are your notions definite on this point? Do you note any 
other terms of the same sort? Compare them with "the individual . . . goes 
back " in Newman's essay (p. 343). 3. What is your opinion of the soundness 
of Arnold's philosophy? Of its applicability? If unsound, is it nevertheless 
worthy and valuable as an impressive reaction against overmuch so-called 
materialism? 4. Examine the structure of some of Arnold's paragraphs, as 
the tenth. What is the place of this paragraph in the essay? Note the 
recurrence of certain phrases in the opening paragraphs. 5. Write an essay 
defining Arnold's idea of culture. Write an essay in answer to his views. 
Explain what Arnold means by the term " Philistine." 

Bagehot : Ornate Art. — The excellent piece of criticism from which this 
selection is taken deals with three types of art, so called, the pure, the ornate, 
and the grotesque, and it illustrates these by examples from three poets, 
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning. Bagehot's attempt is less to criticise 
these poets as individuals than as representatives of different classes of pro- 
duction. He is therefore dealing with the theory of art rather than with 
particular applications, and is to a small degree only concerned with questions 
of good and bad writing. 

I. What does Bagehot mean by the term "ornate art"? By the term 
"purpart," so far as you are able to ascertain it from the present selection? 
What do you infer with regard to Bagehot's notion of " grotesque art " ? 
2. For the time being does Bagehot regard Tennyson as in himself an object 
for criticism, or does he cite him merely as an illustration of a type of art? 
Can you name the poets belonging to this type? 3. Does Bagehot's criticism 
seem to you to be more or less " subjective " or " objective " than that of, say 
Arnold, or Lowell, or other criticism with which you are familiar? In the 
main, should you call it " constructive " or " destructive " ? 4. In particular, 



NOTES AND QUESTIONS 477 

do you find any points at which, on examination of Tennyson's work, you 
dissent from Bagehot? 

Pater: Charles Lamb. — This essay is a good example of Pater's best 
criticism, and it is an interesting illustration of the theory which he ex- 
pounded in the preface to \\\% I!enaissaitce : "The function of the aesthetic 
critic is to distinguish, analyze, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by 
which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book produces 
this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of 
that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced." This prin- 
ciple Pater abides by in the essay on Lamb; he attempts to present, not 
questions of good and bad, but of quality, as it appears to him, and to him 
alone. 

I. Apply the material which Pater uses in his essay to the categories named 
in the foregoing quotation : how far does the critic make use of the events of 
Lamb's life, as the episode of his temporary insanity, or his friendships, to 
bring out the quality or "virtue " of Lamb's writing? To what extent is that 
quaHty brought out by analyses of Lamb's literary work ? To what sources does 
he trace the impressions made upon him by Lamb? What is the total impres- 
sion conveyed to the critic by the author criticised? 2. In what order are 
the impressions, in detail, arranged? Is there any climax to be observed? 
Are the different characteristics of Lamb different expressions of one and the 
same motive ? Why is, or is not, the first paragraph a good point of depar- 
ture? What is the function of the last paragraph? 3. In point of style do 
you find it possible to express Pater's idea in other and equally exact terms? 
4. In general, what should you say with regard to the scientific or philo- 
sophical value of criticism which limits itself strictly to the consideration of 
an author as he appears to the critic, — which does not, in short, attempt to 
discuss questions of good and bad in literature? 

Ruskin: The Pathetic Fallacy. — In this well-known passage, Ruskin's 
chief purpose is to expound a principle by which the excellence or the bad- 
ness of poetry may be determined. Like the passage from Bagehot, it may 
be called constructive, in that there is no attempt arbitrarily to praise or to 
condemn types of poetry, but rather to reason from the common philosophical 
distinction between "subjective" and "objective" and the premise, — said 
by Ruskin to have been previously established, — that nothing can be ultimately 
good which is untrue, to a principle which shall show what truth and falsity are, 
and under what conditions the latter may be justifiable or unwarranted. The 
major part of the chapter is taken up with illustrative proof of this principle. 
Incidentally, the French poem quoted by Ruskin tells the story of a young 
girl who was burned to death as she was preparing to set out for a ball; the 
gist of the tragedy lay in the fact that the gayety continued inexorably. The 
literalness of the narrative is uninterrupted by the " pathetic fallacy " until 
the end, when the fire is described as devouring without pity the beauty of 
the girl. 

I. What does Ruskin mean by the term "pathetic fallacy"? What state 



478 NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

of mind does it describe? \¥hy should the word "fallacy" be used? What 
is meant by "pathetic"? In what respects are the three classes of men 
illustrative of the " pathetic fallacy "? From what point of view is the classi- 
fication complete? Why has Ruskin introduced his fourth class of men? How 
far, from Ruskin's point of view, is it legitimate to use the "pathetic fallacy"? 
2. What is the difference between the terms " subjective " and " objective " 
as explained by Ruskin? How does Ruskin pass from this to his theory of 
the "pathetic fallacy"? Why is this distinction necessary to his theory? 
What further premise is essential? 3. In what respects do the distinctions 
drawn by Ruskin between " It is " and " It seems to be," and the consequent 
determination of good and bad poetry, differ from Pater's theory of criticism? 

Newman: Knozvledge and Professional Skill. — This is an example of an 
orderly, scientific exposition, which aims to present and define a general point 
of view rather than to classify a large body of particular facts. Newman sup- 
ports his classification not so much by evidence and persuasion as by clearness 
of exposition in structure and illustration, to the end that the situation may be 
as exact and reasonable as possible. The passage is characteristic of New- 
man's formality and stateliness, but it makes greater use of quotation than is 
his custom. 

I. What is Newman's idea of a liberal education? Of a professional edu- 
cation? How do these ideas differ from your notion of the terms? Compare 
his conception of the function of universities with that of the universities with 
which you are familiar. 2. By what kind of proof does Newman support his 
theory? What is the meaning of such terms as " the individual . . . goes back " 
(Dr. Copleston, p. 343), and "raise the individual in them" i.e. his relations 
to society (Mr. Davison, p. 345) ? Do they or do they not remain undefined, 
and so assume an important point at issue ? How can such terms be made clear 
and determinate? What do you make of them? 3. How much of Newman's 
chapter is taken up with references and names that are merely local in interest? 
Is the question which they represent, however, a merely local one? 4. What 
is the function, structurally, of each of Newman's main divisions? How does 
each carry the argument forward ? 5. Compare the last section with the close 
of other chapters in Newman, as What is a Univei-sity ? in The Rise and 
Progress of Universities. What are some of the most striking qualities of 
his style? 

Emerson: The American Scholar. — This famous address is characteristic 
of Emerson, in that it contains the same fundamental principles which one 
finds in all his prose essays, and in respect to his terse, stimulating style. The 
passage is to be regarded as persuasive rather than expository or argumentative. 

I. What is the point of view in Emerson's address? In what respects 
is it similar to that enunciated by Carlyle, so far as you are acquainted with 
the latter's views? 2. What points does Emerson insist on as designating the 
scholar? How does Emerson's conception of the liberally educated class 
compare with Newman's? With Arnold's of the man of culture? Why 
did Emerson think that his ideal scholar would be peculiarly characteristic 



NOTES AND QUEST TONS 479 

of America? 3. What points of difference do you note between the style of 
Emerson and that of Thomas Carlyle or Thoreau? What is the general 
difference in tone? Can you call Emerson an exact and systematic critic? 
What do you think Emerson means by such terms as "nature," " the soul en- 
tire sees absolute truth," " out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last 
Alfred and Shakspeare," etc.? Do they contain definite concepts, or suggest 
a point of view? Cite any passages which seem to you specially eloquent, and 
give your reasons for your selection. 

Thoreau : Where I Lived, and What I Lived For. — The main ideas and 
principles which Thoreau here enunciates are of the same general sort and 
of the same character as some special precepts of Emerson in the preceding 
passage, and of Ruskin, too, elsewhere than in the chapter on the Pathetic 
Fallacy ; but Thoreau is far less vehement and has infinitely more humor than 
any of the writers named, at least as they appear in the present volume. His 
views are expressed in a much more off-hand and personal way, and are en- 
livened with bits of his own experience. 

I. State the general points of resemblance among Carlyle, Emerson, and 
Thoreau. To what fundamental principle do they all make appeal ? What 
points of difference in precepts with regard to the wisest manner of conduct- 
ing life do you note ? 2. What descriptive and narrative elements do you 
observe in Thoreau ? 3. What can you say of Thoreau's humor ? What, 
in general, should you say with regard to the character of the three men ? 
Who has the most seriousness? The most eloquence ? the most persuasive- 
ness ? Who has the best style, and why ? 

Lincoln : The Gettysburg Address. — Lincoln's address is to be taken as 
the simple, reserved expression of noble sentiment. Rhetorically, the man- 
agement of the sentences is noteworthy ; in a large way, the passage is the 
classical and final utterance of the idea for which the Civil War was fought. 

The Secotid Inaugural Address. — This, like the preceding address, is a 
simple, stately, classical utterance. 

Mill: On Liberty. — This selection is the introductory section to Mill's 
famous essay, which he regarded as " far surpassing " any of his other work. 
As an introductory passage it clears the ground for the more important dis- 
cussion to follow by stating the sense in which the term " liberty " is to be 
used, by entering into a general history of the idea of liberty, and by ex- 
pounding the points to be established. For the purposes of this volume, it 
illustrates, in particular, excellent introductory work. In addition to this 
special function, it is valuable, though less so than the sections that follow it, 
as an illustration of orderly structure, clear and vigorous style, and earnest 
rationality of purpose. 

I. Name the main topics treated in this passage. Why is each suitable to 
an introduction ? What are the minor points ? What is the chief idea of 
each paragraph ? Draw up a brief of the chapter. What points do you infer 
will be brought up in the ensuing discussion ? 2. Should this essay be called 
argumentative, expository, or persuasive ? What proof does Mill use ? 



480 NOTES AND QUESTIONS 

Thackeray: AHl Nisi Bonum. — This and the following pieces in this 
volume supplement those which have preceded, and furnish further specimens 
for analysis and illustration. They are usually more personal than the former 
selections, but, though consequently more whimsical, contain descriptive, nar- 
rative, expository, argumentative, and persuasive elements differing from the 
others. The list might be prolonged indefinitely by such names as Landor, 
Hazlitt, and Lowell, but the five authors who follow are perhaps as well 
known for style as any who could have been chosen, and each of the pieces 
is characteristic. The present passage is a good example of persuasive work, 
the force of which is in its generous, sympathetic tone. 

I. To what extent may the sentiments and ideas herein expressed be 
deemed critical ? Do they attempt to fix the value of either Irving or 
Macaulay, to state their quality, to indicate good and bad points, or to put the 
reader into a sympathetic frame of mind ? Does he deal with the achieve- 
ments of his subjects or with their characters ? What facts does he bring out ? 
Why should these facts appeal widely to a group of " average " readers ? 
2. What are the main qualities of Thackeray's style ? Analyze some of the 
chief phenomena. Compare the passage with the selection from Pefidennis 
(page 144). Do you note any points of similarity ? 

Carlyle: Dante. — The passage presents a highly personal opinion and 
is hence persuasive rather than strictly critical ; it essays to arouse our 
sympatlyes in Dante, and the type of hero which he represents. The ideas 
and the tone are characteristic of the author : Carlyle's endeavor is to penetrate 
the husk and come close to the soul of things, and the style has the marks of 
the author's vehemence. 

I. Summarize the passage so as to bring out Carlyle's main ideas on Dante. 
How far is Carlyle concerned with external events ? To what does he 
subordinate the narrative of Dante's life ? What is the main idea of this 
narrative ? 2. In what respects is Dante, in Carlyle's opinion, to be called 
a " hero " ? With what does Carlyle compare the spirit which animated the 
poet ? Of what things do you judge Carlyle to approve ? What do you 
infer of his view of life ? In what respects is it similar to that of Emerson 
and Thoreau ? 3. Name some of the conspicuous traits of Carlyle's sen- 
tences and words ? Do you note any singularly chosen words ? What of 
his copiousness ? 

Lamb : M7-s. Battle's Opinions on Whist. — Lamb has depicted the 
character of Mrs. Battle through her opinions on whist and her manner of 
playing the game and in no other way. By these apparently simple means 
he manages to suggest the traits which go to make up the old gentlewoman's 
personality, and finally produces a complete and pretty complex impression 
of her. The literary quality of the essay is unique. 

I. What is the chief impression of the character of Mrs. Battle ? By what 
details is the impression conveyed ? What is the prevailing effect of each 
paragraph ? Describe Mrs. Battle in your own words. 2. What do the 
closing paragraphs add to the feeling of the essay ? What can you say of 



NOTES AND QUESTIONS 48 1 

Lamb's humor ? Of his pathos ? 3. Name some of the qualities of Lamb's 
style ? Does it deal in general ideas or in particular images ? Is it simple 
or complex ? Suggestive or Hteral ? Uniform or varied and whimsical ? 
How far does the essay tally with Pater's criticism ? Read several of Lamb's 
essays and see how far they convey an impression on, and how they exemplify 
Pater's idea. 

De Quincey: The Vision of Sudden Death. — This is characteristic of 
De Quincey in several ways: the discursiveness; the indirectness of approach; 
the love of distinctions, as in the exposition of the views entertained by 
different races; the giving of all the minute circumstances of the story, as 
the crafty statement of his own condition, the deliberate description of the 
place of the catastrophe, and the long-pondered horrific vision; the rapidly 
running and the cumulative sentences, and nicely turned balances, the 
sonorous ending, the copiousness of vocabulary, and the display of rather 
erudite words. 

I. Examine the structure of the piece to see how the main idea of sudden 
death is continually kept before the reader ; enumerate the particulars on 
which De Quincey dwells. Tell the story in your own words. What does 
De Quincey add to the simple narrative account ? How do those details 
render the catastrophe impressive ? 2. Enumerate the chief characteristics 
of De Quincey's style as they have to do with words, sentences, and paragraphs. 

Stevenson : An Apology for Idlers. — The attempt of this essay is to deal 
in a light, easy, persuasive way, appropriate to the subject and the point of 
view, with a subject of much moment. It is, of course, merely a winning 
sketch rather than a solid argument. The fundamental idea — that one is 
bound to get as much happiness from life as possible — is the same as in 
The English Admirals, Aes Triplex, El Dorado, and A Christinas Sermon, 
by the same author; but the application of the principle is as different as the 
style is less grandiloquent. 

I. What points of similarity do you note between the main idea of this 
essay and that of Thoreau ? Is the essay to be taken as dogma, as persuasive 
argument, as the statement of a point of view, or as a merely suggestive 
protest ? 2. How may this argument be answered ? 3. Analyze Stevenson's 
style. What are its chief characteristics ? Its most noteworthy effects ? 
What should you infer with regard to the personality of the author ? 4. Why 
is such a piece as this called an essay ? 



21 



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Edited by GEORGE RICE CARPENTER, 

Profe-isor of Rhetoric and English Composition in Columbia University. 

8vo. Cloth. Price $1.00. 



Professor Willis Boughton, Ohio University, Athens, OAzV» .• — " There is n« 
other book like it. I am sure that you are supplying a want on the part of teach- 
ers." 

Professor James M. Dixon, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. : — 
" The value of ' American Prose ' seems to me singularly well-timed, and the work 
has been efficiently done. The criticism is sympathetic, incisive, and modern. I am 
delighted with the book." 

The book has its use alike for the general reader and for the student. It brings to 
both, within a very moderate compass, not only illustration of American prose, but a 
body of thoroughly competent and discriminating criticism. Among the well-known 
American writers who have contributed critiques to this volume are Professor Trent, 
Professor Munroe Smith, Barrett Wendell, Edward Everett Hale, Jr., Colonel Hig- 
ginson, Brander Matthews, Professor Richardson, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, 
Professor R. E. Gates, Mr. Howells, and John Fiske. 



STUDIES IN STRUCTURE AND STYLE. 

BASED ON SEVEN MODERN ENGLISH ESSAYS. 

By W. T. BREWSTER, A.M., 

Tutor in Rhetoric and English Composition in Columbia University. 
With an Introduction by 

GEORGE R. CARPENTER, 

Professor of Rhetoric and Eiiglish Composition in Columbia University, 

12mo. Cloth. $1.10, net. 



Boston Daily Advertiser : — The author has used rare discrimination in selecting 
the essays which he discusses, insisting that they should be of the highest class of 
modern literature, and that they should serve as models to the student. The analy 
sis^of structure and style in these volumes is most able, and the book will be found a 
most valuable one as a text in the higher American institutions of learning. 

The Beacon (Boston): — Professor Brewster's manual is intelligently planned, and 
the selections made are 'admirable. . . . The advantage which such a work possesses 
over the old-fashioned text-book of rhetoric are too obvious to require comment. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



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